"Skyhawk 872ND, airport at your 12 o'clock in 15 miles."
"Baron 981K, traffic, 2 o'clock 5 miles, opposite direction, a Piper southbound, 1000 feet below you."
Does ATC use nautical miles or statute miles?
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Sign up to join this community"Skyhawk 872ND, airport at your 12 o'clock in 15 miles."
"Baron 981K, traffic, 2 o'clock 5 miles, opposite direction, a Piper southbound, 1000 feet below you."
Does ATC use nautical miles or statute miles?
ATC uses nautical miles, this is because it's the ICAO standard documented in Annex 5 - Units of Measurement to be used in Air and Ground Operations, which states that Nautical Miles are to be used for distance and Knots for speed as an alternative non-SI measurement. Kilometers are actually the primary distance measurement because they are the SI standard, however nautical miles are so entrenched they've kept them and there's no termination date.
The ICAO annex is hard to find because everyone wants you to buy it, however the standards have been copied into this CAAS document word for word if you want some light bedtime reading.
Broadcast weather METARs use statute miles. Navigational information, such as that from ATC, would use nautical miles.
Nautical miles are used for navigation, mainly because a nautical mile is one minute of a degree on the surface of Earth's geoid.(basically one minute of latitude.)
Kilometers and statute miles are each a fixed distance unit, nautical miles are not a fixed straight line distance but are a fixed fraction of the earth's circumference. Very useful for long range navigation and triangulation, 60 miles to each degree and exactly 21600 nautical miles per circumnavigation.