SEATTLE If youre like millions of Americans this holiday season, theres a good chance youll be taking a flight somewhere. Even if youre not flying yourself, you may well be visiting an airport to pick somebody up or drop them off.

The part you wont see is the inside of an air traffic control tower. It's a darkened room full of screens and air traffic controllers at a terminal radar control facility, or an en-route center that handles flights between cities.

Given Washington's close proximity to the Canadian border, many residents often fly over U.S. and Canadian air traffic control centers.

In many ways, Canadian ATC technology is ahead of the United State's.

In 1996, Canadas air traffic control system was sold by the government and became a private, not for profit corporation known as NAV Canada. Even if you've never set foot in Canada, if youve ever been a passenger aboard an airliner between Seattle and Europe, odds are pretty high that youve flown through Canadian air space to get there and back.

NAV Canada has been widely credited with being able to bring new technologies on faster. Part of that is credited with its ability to borrow money on the private market. Its funding largely comes from fees charged to airlines, including those that fly over the country.

As an example, NAV Canada finished shifting from paper flight strips used to manage aircraft in its air traffic control towers to electronic ones back in 2010. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is only beginning to use electronic strips as part of its NextGen program, and those towers equipped with electronic strips are at Phoenix and Charlotte, North Carolina. Sea-Tac is not scheduled to go to electronic strips until 2025.

It also plays out in other ways-- the Canadian integrated air traffic management system known as NAVCANatm is now being used in London, elsewhere in Europe, Australia and countries in the Middle East.

But the FAA is no slouch when it comes to air traffic control, and the U.S. is a country where flying has never been safer. While still part the government, its also a system serving a country 10 times larger than Canadas, serving 44,000 flights a day and 3 million passengers, according to agency numbers.

One area where the FAA is running ahead is enhancing the situational awareness for pilots and helping them avoid mid-air collisions. And not just airline pilots, but all pilots through a technology known as ADS-Bstanding for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast.

By Jan. 1, 2020, all aircraft, whether theyre airliners or single-seaters, will have to be ADS-B equipped to fly in controlled airspace. With rare exceptions, thats pretty much everybody. Even some drones are being equipped to receive ADS-B signals from another aircraft to automatically get out of the way.

Canada is still working through its universal ADS-B requirements, which also uses more satellite technology, but its not expected to be fully mandatory possibly until 2024.

Read more:

Canada ahead of the U.S. with some air traffic control technologies - KING5.com