According to Wikipedia, NATS is a private/public partnership, 49% owned by the UK Government. This means that whoever has the 51% stake will be keen to maximise profits, but the Government probably are too, to help reduce the Country's deficit.
Having a remotely operated Tower is presumably their beancounter's way of doing this - if they can make it work. They will have to pay for the technology once but will save thousands of pounds in London staff wages etc, year on year, and will no doubt roll it out to other airfields.
Instead of each Tower needing its own extra controllers to cover shifts, leave, and sickness etc, one set of spare controllers could cover several Towers controlled from the same room at Swanwick. I don't know the figures so am going to pluck some out of the air and guess at 10 controllers for a small airfield Tower - so say four Towers that used to need a total of 40 staff could be remotely controlled by a complement of say 20 staff at Swanwick?
My figures might be way off but the principle is what I am talking about.
Someone on this thread said the Met office now use remote sensing instead of experts 'on the ground', and I think their forecasts are worse than they used to be. Where I live, they are often plain wrong. I fear this will happen with NATS. En route controller frequencies are already getting busier and busier because more and more traffic is being controlled by fewer and fewer contollers, to the detriment of the service and flight safety.
No amount of cameras, automatic drone spotters and other gizmos can make up for the situational awareness that comes from actually sitting in the Tower with one's binoculars - seeing the Red Arrows cross your airspace, observing the storm clouds in the far distance, watching the police, ambulance or traffic helicopter and all manner of SA clues and cues that you just won't get in the same way on a couple of HD screens.
And of course, when the video links go down - and they will !! - What then ??
Last edited by Uplinker; 23rd May 2017 at 15:40.