Originally Posted by
Atcham Tower
Thanks Alfaman, they kept that quiet! Or at least I missed any publicity.
Here you go...
London City airport replaces control tower with virtual system
Air traffic controllers 70 miles away to oversee landings in UK first
April 29, 2021
https://www.ft.com/content/1c3d319f-...2-20d9270402de
London City has become the first airport in the UK to install a virtual control tower, putting all operations in to the hands of controllers based more than 70 miles away on the south coast of England.
Management at the 30-year-old airport has spent the past few years installing 16 cameras and sensors mounted on a 50m mast to provide a live 360 degree view of the runway, taxiways and aprons, as well as the surrounding airspace.
The feed is passed through fibre optic cables to the control centre operated by Nats, the country’s main air traffic manager, in Swanwick, Hampshire. The live footage, an audio feed and radar information is used to control aircraft on the ground at the airport and give them permission to take-off and land.
The new technology at London City was officially unveiled on Friday but has quietly been in use since late January. It was originally scheduled to go live in 2019.
Tower controllers rely on the human eye to manage aircraft movements on the ground and at the very start and end of flights, when aircraft are on final approach or about 30 seconds from the runway.
Air traffic controllers at Nats handle all other UK traffic. The Swanwick centre’s main roles are to manage all high-altitude aircraft crossing through English and Welsh airspace and handle all flights below 24,500 feet as they fly in and out of all of London’s airports, including City. Nats has a second control centre in Scotland.
The new system at City is built by Saab, the Swedish aerospace group, and has already been installed at some of Sweden’s airports. The technology allows controllers to magnify objects up to 30 times, and the screens can be overlaid with an “enhanced reality view” including information such as call signs, altitude and speed of aircraft.
“Digital tower technology tears up a blueprint that’s remained largely unchanged for 100 years, allowing us to safely manage aircraft from almost anywhere, while providing our controllers with valuable new tools that would be impossible in a traditional control tower,” said Juliet Kennedy, operations director at Nats.
The biggest challenge could be reassuring the public that removing sharp-sighted controllers from the airport is safe. But Alison FitzGerald, chief operating officer at London City, said the technology was “proven” and had more than a decade of research and live trials behind it.
“The system is designed to safely manage any equipment failures with backups available if required,” she said.
If one static camera fails then the image can be replaced by one of the mast’s tilting zoom cameras, while there are back-up screens at Nats in case of a failure there, she said.
She added that “two entirely independent, private fibre network connections carry the camera images”.
The 30-year-old analogue control tower in the London Docklands will be redeveloped as part of a modernisation plan at the airport, parts of which have been delayed by the financial impact of the pandemic.
Passenger numbers fell more than 80 per cent to 905,000 last year, a period when the airport was closed for three months.
The remote technology has the potential to significantly improve efficiency, and Nats has estimated it could cut costs of managing traffic into and out of an airport by 20 to 30 per cent if rolled out across several sites.