Tarmac is a path-drawing air traffic control game set on a night airfield radar display. Aircraft enter from the screen edges carrying coloured class markings — green class A, amber class B, and blue class C. Your job is to draw a route from each aircraft to its matching runway before it drifts into another plane. Press and hold on any aircraft, drag toward its destination, and release: the plane locks onto the polyline you just drew and flies it exactly. One collision ends the run.
At the start of each run only Runway Alpha and Runway Bravo are active. For the first 60 seconds you manage two lanes of traffic. On the first arrival at or after the 60-second mark Runway Charlie unlocks, a C UNLOCKED badge appears in the mode bar, the run timer turns blue, and a third class of aircraft joins the spawn pool. Charlie planes are slower — but their runway sits at the top-centre of the field, well away from the Alpha and Bravo zones, so adding a third traffic lane while spawn intervals are tightening is a meaningful mid-game challenge.
The outer warning circle (40-pixel radius) gives early notice when two planes are converging — the pulsing red glow and audible tick mean you should redraw one of their routes now, not when they are about to touch. The actual collision threshold is much tighter at 18 pixels, so a warning never means the run is already lost. Redraw mid-flight by pressing the plane again and dragging a new path; the aircraft immediately abandons its old route and follows the new one.
Modern air traffic control traces its roots to the 1920s, when rapid growth in commercial aviation made mid-air collisions a genuine hazard. The earliest controllers were flagmen on grass runways, waving biplanes toward open grass or signalling a hold. Radio telephony changed the profession in the 1930s: Newark and Cleveland airports deployed the first two-way radio contact with pilots, allowing verbal clearances and heading vectors for the first time. The sky had acquired an audible nervous system.
Radar transformed the work a second time in the late 1940s. Surplus military radar units — adapted from wartime anti-aircraft installations — gave controllers a top-down display of the airspace that had previously existed only as mental models and strip boards. The United States' SAGE network (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, operational by 1957) pioneered computer-assisted radar tracking at continental scale, and civil equivalents arrived within the decade. The 1944 Chicago Convention, which produced ICAO standards still in force today, established the separation minima that Tarmac simulates: aircraft are kept apart by class, by vector, and by assigned runway — one path at a time.
Today roughly 45,000 flights cross US airspace on a busy day. Each is handed off between sector controllers, sequenced for approach, and cleared to land — the same draw-path logic the game uses, executed at continental scale, without pause. The difference is that real controllers manage up to 20 aircraft simultaneously, have no undo on a mis-issued clearance, and cannot redraw a plane's route mid-flight. Tarmac lets you try a small, honest version of that puzzle.
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