Air traffic management
Heathrow’s digital tower lab combines ultra- HD cameras, machine learning and AI to help prevent delays.
That means satellite navigation, complex algorithms and automated tools – all of which help the EU’s air traffic management system keep over 25,000 daily flights punctual and safe. In the US, for its part, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has spent a colossal $3bn on new software, something shadowed by its counterparts from Shanghai to New Delhi. Yet for all their gadgetry, to say nothing of their tireless workload, air traffic controllers haven’t advanced as far as you might expect. Their wooden shacks have been replaced by steel and concrete towers, but many still rely on the same tools that served their predecessors in the early days of aviation: their wits, their eyes and a trusty pair of binoculars. In recent years, however, air traffic controllers have begun moving decisively away from all this – and now even their towers in the sky are at risk of extinction. And though there are certainly challenges ahead, their replacements – digital towers hundreds of miles from runways and terminals – could yet change aviation for good.
London stalling 50m Height of the
London City Airport control tower.
London City Airport 30
Fly into London City Airport, and its nomenclature will announce itself like a trumpet. As you approach the runway, the Thames to your back, the umbrella of the city unfurls around you, flats and pubs and a Sainsbury’s Local all within hopping distance of the runway. The airport complex itself feels almost like an afterthought, squeezed into barely a square mile of turf. To put that into perspective, Heathrow luxuriates across nearly five times that. London City, in other words, is an incredibly cramped environment, something Andy Taylor says puts a premium on every inch of land. That’s especially true, explains NATS’s chief solutions officer for digital towers, when you add land reclamation to the equation. “The land is so valuable that it’s a fine balance between using any more of it than you need to house things like air traffic control.”
That’s precisely the problem London City faced a few years back. Its old air traffic control tower, squat like a ship’s deck, was too low to properly cover every corner of the airport, especially after it extended its taxiways. Of course, airport managers could simply have invested in a new, taller tower. But even ignoring the costs of London real estate, brick-and-mortar towers can cost up to $200m (about £149m), as was the case with Philadelphia International Airport’s new tower. And, as Conor Mullan emphasises, this is far from a purely British problem. In Sweden, explains the managing director at Think Research, an independent air traffic management consultancy, Scandinavian Mountains Airport faced similar challenges, and was even on the verge of building what Mullan describes as an expensive “monument of the sky”.
A solution to these problems has theoretically been around for years: digital towers. Rather than building physical towers and manning them with binocular-toting staff, airports could simply place powerful cameras around their airport instead. As long as the connection is strong enough, officials could observe their patch from miles away. That sounds elegant enough – but then why have digital towers typically been shunned by airports the world over? One answer is the profession itself. Mullan says that trade unions resent new technology muscling in on their turf, something Taylor suggests reflects his own experience. As a senior air traffic control official at Gatwick until 2015, he says he and his colleagues probably didn’t “appreciate the technology” available to them.
This speaks to a wider point – the gap between the power of digital towers in theory and actually implementing change in the field. As Mullan explains, airports across Germany and Scandinavia have been aware of digital tower technology since the mid-2000s. “But,” says Mullan, “they didn’t really know how they would use it, what they would use it for, or how they would justify it.” Over the past decade or so, however, this uncertainty has gradually dissipated. One explanation could be the sharpening of the technology itself. It’s easier to appreciate the benefits of camera-led surveillance when the cameras themselves now boast HD resolution and increased storage. Another reason might be the dramas of recent years. If other white- collar workers can clearly do their work remotely, why not their cousins in air traffic control?
Eye in the sky
In some ways, London City’s updated tower looks like its traditional forebears. Like them, it soars high into the sky above the terminal and the river beyond. At 50m, in fact, the airport now boasts one of the tallest towers in the UK. But look more
Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
NATS
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