In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, well, there’s work and there’s Flight Control. And I’m not sure which has commanded more of my time lately. 

This one’s a real gem.  It’s only 99 cents but a bargain at twice the price.  Like with most good iPhone games, it’s easy to learn but difficult to master… and oh so addictive.

Essentially, you are an air traffic controller… or more accurately, the ONLY air traffic controller, for a mid-sized airport.  There are 2 runways, one for commercial traffic and one for civil aviation, and a helipad.  It is your chore to guide the brain-dead pilots to a safe landing by tracing a path with your finger for them to follow, which they obediently do.

And then all hell breaks loose.  More and more aircraft demand your attention.  And they all have differing speeds, so simply queuing them up to land or timing their crossing of paths won’t always work.  Then, just as you get the hang of it, jumbo jets enter the mix to land at the commercial runway.  But they’re faster even than the smaller jets, so your timing not only gets thrown to the wind, you have to somehow time their descents along with the other planes heading for the same touchdown.  Still sound easy?  Well, they throw many planes at you at a time and you have limited airspace to have them maneuver in.  And you don’t want them close to the edges because that’s where other aircraft come in from.

Eventually, you’ll make a mistake somewhere and two planes will collide, ending that round.  Usually, it makes me grunt with angst, reminiscing at all the planes I successfully landed, only to make a tiny mistake.

This is a great game and a wonderful 5-minute distraction.  It’s difficult to play in a non-still environment (like a bus or car… please don’t play if YOU are the driver), but you’ll still try.

I do have a few nits, of course.  No game is 100% perfect.

First, it would be nice if games were pausable and restartable.  You can pause your game, but if you leave the app (say, for a phone call or to respond to a text message), you won’t be able to continue where you left off.  I suppose this might prompt some people to just quit the app if they screw up to try and keep their stats high.  But c’est la vie.

As well, the airport never changes.  That would be a great bonus, to have different airports to control.

Next, the planes seem to arrive in patterns, not truly randomly.  I guess this is good in a way in that it tries to set you up for failure.  But a more random smattering of planes and entry points would be great.

It would also be nice to have a “holding pattern.”  If you direct a plane toward the edge of the screen, it just bounces back in.  I would love a “holding pattern” where periodically all planes off-screen in the pattern just enter the screen all at once.  So it wouldn’t really be a big help, but at least if something unwieldy crops up, you can at least send a plane or two off the screen only to return some seconds later.

And finally, the sound.  It’s nice that this app lets you choose whether you want the sound on or off at its start.  But what if you need to change it in the middle.  You can’t (that I know of).  Some games use the “silent ringer” switch as a cue to what the sound settings should be.  I like this way of doing things.

In the end, I highly recommend this app.  And I hope the author decides to update it every now and then to make it better and better.

Now go on out there and land some planes!