Digital Control Towers Will Not Be Located at Airports

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Digital remote control towers are revolutionizing air traffic management. Digital air traffic control means airports can manage their planes from anywhere in the world. London City is the first airport in the UK to move its air traffic control to a digital “tower” as part of a £480 million development programme. By 2020, the functions of its existing 18m control tower will be transferred in full to a series of high-resolution digital cameras atop an as-yet-unbuilt 550-meter mast – and the control room in Hampshire.

As long as the four members of the control team can see – and hear – the planes, they can manage them in the same way they would if they were sat in a real tower next to the airport’s terminal. “The sound is because of the importance of situational awareness to air traffic controllers,” says Steve Anderson, head of airport transformation at air traffic control provider Nats. “As the sun sets in London the lights here will dim, too.” “If you can see the plane, you can control the plane,” says Anderson.

Three airports in Sweden already use the technology, while Budapest is planning to introduce digital operations by 2020. Nats won a contract to develop a digital control tower for Singapore Changi, an airport voted the best in the world for six years running, reports telegraph.co.uk.

At Nats Swanwick, a purpose-built site that manages thousands of flights a day across UK airspace, London City’s digital control tower is diminutive for the scale of its task. It is hosted in a room like any other. A desk for two seats, the controllers and their computers, radars and radios, in front of 14 curved HD screens that offer a 360-degree panoramic view of London City’s sole runway, its terminals and gates and the immediate approach and take-off air space. From here, the controllers will communicate with flight crew in the air and on the ground as well as ground crew in the same way they would if they were in the tower.

The digitalization of the process affords elements unavailable to traditional towers. Controllers can overlay weather data onto the live video (today it is just a recording as the tower will not be operational until 2020), making it easier to monitor wind speeds on the runway. Radar information of the aircraft identified – and then tracked – by the cameras also appears on the screens. A zoom function allows a constant binocular view on any portion of the sky, giving controllers an additional weapon in the fight against rogue drones in and around the airport.

Filters and on-camera blinds reduce the risk of glare from the sun affecting the view of the controllers, while also providing defense in case of a laser-pen attack. It may sound trivial, but the panoramic view condensed onto a gentle semi-circle reduces the need for controllers to turn around to see any aircraft that might otherwise be seen behind them in the tower.

The cameras themselves are in a bulletproof casing on the tower, their screens cleaned when necessary by compressed air jets, which also keep insects from the lens. A moving marker at the top of each screen shows that the camera has not frozen and the control room is receiving a live feed.

Also at London Heathrow, the world’s seventh busiest airport, Nats is working with Searidge Technologies to deliver some of the benefits of digitalization, such as the zoom feature and the ability to overlay weather conditions, without switching to a fully digital service.