HAIKOU, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- Huang Peng barely had time to finish instructing more than 20 aircraft to make simultaneous course adjustments before moving on to finish extra administrative work and prepare flight plans.
A busy night of work is just part of the routine for air traffic controllers working in the Area Control Center (ACC) of the Sanya Flight Information Region (FIR), the youngest of China's eight FIRs, located in south China's island province of Hainan. At times of high traffic, Huang can only return home once every three or four days.
Huang has been dealing with twice the amount of work lately, as the understaffed center has had to cope with mounting air traffic with the changing of the season.
Ten years ago, China's civil aviation authorities began managing air traffic across the Sanya FIR, a 280,000-square-km patch of airspace above the South China Sea.
The Sanya FIR is an important aviation channel for aircraft flying to southeast Asia from Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The Sanya ACC directed more than 1.68 million flights as of the end of October, expediting the flow of air traffic and providing information for pilots to help them bring their passengers back to earth safely.
The centers' air traffic controllers manage an average of 638 aircraft per day, twice as many as the amount managed ten years ago. The figure is estimated to be rising by 10.2 percent annually.
Huang said that while air traffic controllers on the Chinese mainland usually take a half-hour break every two hours while they're working, the Sanya ACC's controllers are lucky to get even five minutes, as the region's airspace has become increasingly crowded in recent years.
Huang said his 4-year-old daughter is already getting used to his absence, never asking him to take her out. "I feel guilty each time I kiss her goodbye," he said.
Describing air traffic control as a "time-consuming and stressful job," Huang and his colleagues are required to make swift and accurate decisions and give pilots clear instructions after weighing a slew of variables, including equipment configurations, weather and traffic volume.
"When I first started to work, I had nightmares of plane crashes so frequently that I doubted whether I could work under such pressure. So did my colleagues. Luckily, in our actual work, we never make such mistakes," Huang said.
Instead, Huang and his teammates feel a sense of accomplishment each time they successfully deal with an emergency.
In 2002, when a flight en route from Bangkok to Hong Kong experienced a cabin fire, the Sanya ACC directed the plane to safely land at the Haikou Meilan International Airport.
The center also helped save a heart patient from Bangkok by figuring out the shortest route possible between Bangkok and Sanya. The flight landed one hour earlier than originally expected, allowing the patient to receive timely medical treatment.
The Sanya AAC began optimizing air routes when the Sanya Area of Responsibility (AOR) officially became the Sanya FIR in 2006. Starting from 2007, flights from Haikou and Sanya no longer had to detour through the Hong Kong FIR to arrive in southeast Asia. By flying through the Sanya FIR, airlines can save 2 hours' flight time and more than 200,000 yuan (31,500 U.S. dollars) in operating costs per flight for larger aircraft like the Airbus 340.
Thanks to bilateral cooperation between China and Vietnam and the joint efforts of organizations and neighboring countries in the region, the Sanya ACC has provided quality air traffic control services for ten years, said Yu Wenjun, director of the Air Traffic Management Bureau's Hainan branch under the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
He said the establishment of the Sanya FIR has not only provided a better air travel experience to the general public, but also promoted the sustained, stable and coordinated development of civil aviation in the Asia-Pacific region.
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