Lots of negative views here but they are coming; try not to be a Luddite.

Look at Dublin, which can now control Cork and Shannon.

Also Sweden which has fully embraced it for the remote northern airports; cost savings in recruitment, training, familiarisation, retention, and buildings is very significant. They help to ensure airports with few scheduled flights/day stay operational. Hard to justify the costs to import human ATCOs to live in the remotest of places to clear perhaps 10 flights per shift.

Australia uses Remote Towers for places like Alice Springs airport, which is controlled from Adelaide some 1,500km away. And how many capable, well paid controllers want to live in the Outback: if you think it's easy, you've never tried recruiting the numbers needed to fill a roster for such places.

These airports will prove the veracity of the technology, like the ETOPS Twins eventually tolled the death knell for the B747/A340's on the trans-oceanic routes.

Adding to V12's post, I think this will allow expansion of ATC services, not a contraction. It will allow airports previously unable to expand because of the cost of ATC services to now attract commercial operators who demand certain minimum levels of control.

PM

Dont believe the hype :rolleyes:

Australia uses Remote Towers for places like Alice Springs airport, which is controlled from Adelaide some 1,500km away.

Not correct. A remote tower monitored in Adelaide was trialled in Alice Sprngs but never commissioned. There was a plan to use remote towers to enable quick establishment during the mining boom to cater for a rapid a increase in FIFO mine workers but the boom came and went and no remote towers were ever built.

Yep , do not believe the Press releases or read them very carefully . most claims are just trials , like the last one in Saarbruecken by DFS/Frequentis . 5 days ..
Norway is AFIS not ATC , etc...
That said the thing is coming , and big time. Half of the CANSO/ATC exhibition in Madrid last week was about Remote ATS ( yes not only TWRs, but APPs and small ACCs will be next )
Multiple OPS is the big issue, will be difficult to sell to us , but they will get there one day because without it there is no business case. Cost benefit is only showing with multiple simultaneous OPS. not just one to one remote unit. More expensive.
The thing that will slow this down the timescale is not Controllers but the current stable availability and cost of High speed data transfer on secure lines.

Last nail in the coffin : ICAO just announced that one hurdle on DOC4444 . ( the visual acquisition bit) was cleared. "visual " can now also be via a display.

NATS are thinking about a remote tower option for London City!!!

Discuss.

An airport with a difficult approach, varying wind conditions and weather phenomena, plus surrounded by tall buildings. An apron with limited manoeuvrability, and 400 plus movements a day.

Interesting.

NimmerDevil's advocate : those are for the pilots , the controller only ensures separation with other aircraft and vehicles on the RWY/maneuvering area.
And that can be done , and even enhanced (e.g. Infra Red cameras) with remote tower technology.
That said, the 400 Mvts a day bit is where the hurdle will be me thinks.

I think the controllers do a little more than ensuring separation on the ground...

In any case, my main point, is why does the movement rate per day matter?
It's the same job, probably with a better view, probably with better situational awareness (assuming some of the additional tools are provided), the only real difference being that you're looking at screens rather than out of a window.
Whether it's 10 movements a day, 400 or 800 doesn't make a difference in my opinion.

Why does everyone think it's the ANSPs pushing this? Where does an ANSP stand if the airport who pays them wants the tower to disappear? Or wants to realise cost savings of combining ops with other airports on night shifts?

Speaking as a passenger-and we do have a a stake in this even if most don't have an interest , it would not worry me flying into an airport witha dozen movements a day if it was remotely controlled from some kind of hub unit so longas there were proper protectios in place for bad visibility etc .

I would asume that for busy places Gatwick LHR MAN its nevr going to hapen because of the scale of operations and the ground movements - look at the capacity at LHR and how it falls when LVPs in operation.

I dont think the telecoms side is an issue at all now although i accept that the often somewhat isolated position of smaller airports might make multiple physical links difficult but I would have thought that most locations could easily get two fixed line paths with a third by microwave or other radio link. In many cases now you can use LAN technology which gives good resilience but needs careful planning to make sure the actual physical carriage of the intermingled data is actually done on sperate links separate. Its not uncommon for companies to find that you buy a service from company A and a back up from company B that t when something goes wrong they both leased the lines from BT and they are in the same cable.

What would worry me though is the issue of bonus driven perhaps not real 'industry' managers (in UK we specialise in non specialist managers to our great national detriment) just pushing the boundaries that little bit too much just to improve this years 'numbers' over last year, So for me it is the worry that the 'business opportunity' will at some point trump safety in some meeting when no one there has ever actually spoken into a mike

PB

Pax,

Thanks for your view, interesting to get the passenger's thoughts.

Interestingly though, the greatest constraint at busy airports in LVP is not the lack of view out of the window. It's the protection of the ILS signal to the required level; which involves ensuring aircraft are further away from the runway than in good weather, before giving the next landing clearance. We do this by using ground radar systems. We could do this task just as well in a room with no windows or visual camera feeds.

pax britanica, it's quite possible this could happen in other areas without a business case for remote towers to be made.

Some might say it already has.

The ILS protection problem will go away if airlines move to GPS approaches which are on their way. Remote towers might mean a few less controllers but most will still be there as they are still doing the job. Remote towers are just a new place to work not an automated system.

They probably work best as economies of scale though and it's a very fair point that it might be hard for airports to change provider if they wanted to in that situation. Also with nats losing contracts of late the market is getting fragmented.

Where does an ATCO stand if it all goes 't*ts-up big-time' when he/she is controlling 2 towers at the same time?
"We could do this task just as well in a room with no windows or visual camera feeds".........Excellent, Gonzo. Just install the kit in your VCR, then you will have the best of both worlds. 100% coverage, as befits a 'Global-Leading' ANSP.

The ILS protection problem will go away if airlines move to GPS approaches which are on their way.

Hmmm.. interesting.

There's a school of thought that Remote Tower might actually be possible at major airports - systemised, high volume operations, where the tower view is important but the Controllers have other ATM systems available, such as SMR and/ or MLAT.

V12 & Piltdown have it right. Horses for courses, and places like NZ & Canada will also embrace this development. The operational environment in the UK is somewhat different, but there are likely to be benefits from this technology.

Good egg: Of course , and I did not say that either, maybe I should have put a comma before " and" but what I wanted to say was that how difficult it is to fly the approach is not part of the controller tasks.

As to the number of Mvts , yes it is a problem because it affect the concept of multi airport simultaneously controlled by a single controller . Remember that is where the benefits will be . Switching to remote from an existing concrete TWR is far more expensive.

Last bit to show our employers way of thinking : last week in Madrid CANSO introduced the notion of cross borders remote TWR operations. Digest slowly that one for a minute...

GBAS CAT III won't get you much more than we can get today out of the latest 32 element ILS systems in terms of mitigating sensitive areas.

Meanwhile airports are working on reducing their exposure to LVP by reducing or removing the cloud trigger, IRVR credits etc.

The business case for GBAS is not an easy one.

ILS will be the dominant landing system for the next 20 years, if not a lot longer.

Yes, but again, what about if the airport wants to remove the tower, or is expanding and doesn't want to build a new one?

There are bits of kit that you could have in a remote tower operation that you either can't fit, or wouldn't work, in a VCR.