Denver (ZDV) Air Route Traffic Control Center

ZDV Information

The original Denver ARTCC was commissioned on March 1, 1942 and was located at the Denver Municipal Airport. A small staff of 12 controllers made up the work force at that time.

The current facility was completed in 1962 and in 1998 moved into a newly completed DSR control room. ZDV covers 285,000 square miles of airspace over portions of 9 states including:

• Colorado
• Arizona
• New Mexico
• Utah
• Kansas
• Nebraska
• South Dakota
• Wyoming
• Montana

Adjacent ARTCC's include Minneapolis, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City Centers. ZDV is the 16th busiest center with 1.8 million operations in 2006 with 6 aread of operation.

ZDV Area 1

Area 1 covers all airspace AOB FL260 in the mountainous areas west and southwest of Denver. The area serves arrival and departure traffic in an out of the major ski country airports. It also includes sectors that provide final sequencing into DIA from the northwest and southwest arrival gates as well as the west departure gate from DIA.

ZDV Area 2

Area 2 is a combination of both low and high airspace and encompasses the east departure gate from DIA. The low altitude airspace is mainly the lower terrain airspace in the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. This area is greatly impacted by lines of thunderstorms in the summer that often stretch for several hundred miles from north to the south.