System Design: Designing an Air Traffic Control System

Question

Design a system to manage takeoffs and landings at an airport.

Background

This question is not a typical system design question, but the skills needed to answer this question are still very relevant to system design. Here we have a complex and ambiguously defined system that needs to be designed and broken down into its component parts. It’s actually very useful to practice system design on curveball questions such as this since you won’t know what you’ll be asked the day of the interview, and being able to approach such a question in a structured and methodical manner is critical to passing.

Solution approach

Since this is a unique question, we’ll follow a similar but abbreviated approach as we did for the previous questions. We will skip Scaling the Design and Capacity Modeling since the volume of data we will handle is fairly low and this question is more unique.

• Define system requirements:

  Before we begin any design, we’ll spend a few minutes agreeing on the one to two primary use cases you’ll need to cover.

• System breakdown:

  We’ll then diagram the key individual components of the system needed to address the one to two primary use cases.

• Dataflow discussion:

  We’ll discuss the necessary data points the system will need to collect and how they flow through the system.