Wherever you’re flying from, whether you’re on a business trip or a holiday, your aeroplane takes
off and is guided into land the same way. In an air traffic control tower, a vast structure often found tucked away behind a terminal building, Air traffic controllers look out the window and monitor radar, conferring over radio with pilots about when and where they can take off and land.
It’s a system that has worked for decades, but increasingly feels outdated. So now things are beginning to change, as the remote working revolution is coming to air traffic management.
From January 2020, flights in and out of London City Airport won’t be guided in land by an air traffic controller in a tower on-site, but by controllers 128 kilometres away in Swanwick, Hampshire, at the headquarters of the National Air Traffic Services, or NATS, the body which oversees air traffic in the UK. The bulky tower that currently looms over the airport will be replaced by a sleek new one a fraction of the size, adorned with the latest video streaming technology.
In the new system, between 300 and 500 megabits per second of livestreaming video footage, captured by a nest of 14 HD cameras and two pan-tilt-zoom cameras providing a full 360 degree view of the airport, will be transported back to NATS headquarters via fibre lines moving anywhere between 300 and 500MB of data per second. Once there, the images are displayed on 14 HD screens producing a panoramic view of the entire airfield.
“We couldn’t have done this 10 or 20 years ago,” explains Steve Anderson, head of airport transformation at NATS. “The camera technology just wasn’t there, and the cameras themselves weren’t reliable enough.”
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Radar control, which tracks the planes in the skies above, has been operated remotely from UK airports by NATS for nearly 20 years, but the eyes on the ground have until now always been confined to a tall tower in one corner of an airport. Planes land and take off from airports thanks to the guidance of two teams – air traffic controllers and radar controllers.
London City – where 40 aircraft take off and land every hour – is the third airport to commit to this new technology, but by far the biggest. In Sweden, two remote, rarely-used airports have already installed similar towers: Örnsköldsvik in 2015, and Sundsvall in 2016. Similar trials are taking place across the world.
The airport and NATS had to spend many months convincing the Civil Aviation Authority, which oversees air safety, that the system was suitable and failure proof.
NATS also had some sceptics internally, who wondered whether it wouldn't always be safer to have the tower at the airport. "This is one I hear quite a lot," Anderson wrote in a recent blog post. "I always answer by turning the question around: could it not be safer and more resilient to have your ATC operation offsite?
"As a former controller myself I was a total sceptic about the concept," he continued, "but having now seen it and experienced it, I’m not only a convert, I’m utterly convinced that what they offer is something not only better, but also safer than today."
The new, 50-metre-high digital tower (a magnitude of scale taller than the airport's existing 18 metre tower), which is currently being constructed at the midway point of London City’s runway, will be tested before going live in January 2020. Although the camera-led tower can be little more than a pole to which the camera rig is attached, London City has elected to build a tower with a footprint 50 per cent bigger than the minimum required.
“The job of the tower controller is to look at a plane out of a window, so we really need to give them a view that’s representative of the human eye,” explains Anderson. The cameras in the sky will allow controllers an even better view: users will be able to zoom in up to 30 times closer than the human eye would be able to, and at Swanwick they’ll be able to overlay radar information and other details on top of the picture, just like a video game heads-up display.
London City Airport’s outsourced air traffic control tower is the first in the UK – but is unlikely to be the last. “As we start to get three, four and five towers in the same building, you get some benefits,” Anderson explains. “Controllers can control more than one airport in a given day.”
And already, business is looking up – just kast week, NATS announced that it had been awarded the contract to develop a prototype smart digital tower for Singapore's giant Changi Airport, the world's sixth-busiest. “There’s been a lot of excitement, and we’re trying to convert that into proper business interest,” says Anderson.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/london-city-airport-remote-air-traffic-control
