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Old 29th Oct 2015, 01:15
  #32 (permalink)  
3miles
 
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None of your arguments or suggestions address the basic issue of staffing in the event that things suddenly get very busy very quickly due to, say, an emergency, or multiple diversions due to unexpected weather.
But where is any of that specific to remote towers? A single tower at night now doesn't contain the staff/positions seen during the day operation.

The key difference and research that's ongoing - is more about how you manage a remote tower centre. The view could be that say you had 3 airports remoted to a single centre - you may be able to, at low workload times have one ATCO control all 3 airports at same time(using new tech) however you'd still have in that building 3 ATCOs(as you need to give breaks anyhow etc) (same as most glass towers now at night) should your doom and gloom situation occur - the tech allows you to split it out and the 3 airports now controlled individually by 3 ATCOs. No different from any bandboxing that happens now in towers or centres.

Point to equally consider is to think about what you might be combining 1 ATCO may be doing 3 airports but that's 3 airports GMP, where the air and gmc still have a dedicated or multiple ATCOs still providing that element per airport.

Because of the way you could display the view(not limited to just replicating the non optimised tower view now - you could display two runways at two airports - no different from where some ATCOs control two runways now, but in that case they often required to turn their head to see both and actually can't look at both fully at all times, in remote tower the screen layout could allow you to see both at all times without turning your head,add in the digital safety nets that can detect incursions, highlight overlays on the image and even display surveillance data on the visual image, giving even more situational awareness without the ATCO needing to look down at a different screen or strips etc, you've improved the situational awareness, safety. But regardless of the technology it still comes back to a workload, and the management and choice to operate this way no different from desicions made now on bandboxing. All the technology does is give you another way to operate, same as radar fusion did - you couldn't bandbox sectors if each working position could only take one radar feed, mosaic radar allows you to technically see the whole country at a single working position, which if the WL was such one ATCO could bandbox sectors.
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