The Tech Making Airport Towers Obsolete | WSJ Booked 

I'm all for digital air towers and improvements, but decentralizing air traffic control into one location instead of local air traffic controls at each airport seems like a great way for one internet connection to ruin 20 airports

As an airline pilot I can say that for sure at least in the US, the ATC system is under extreme pressure. In 20+ years of flying I've never heard the frequencies be so congested and the controllers sounding so winded at peak hours, and they often have to resort to many delay vectors even on perfectly clear days. It's not their fault, just the nature of the beast. The FAA innovates at the speed of molasses due to all the regulatory red tape involved which is great for safety but terrible for efficiency. In the early 2000s they came out with the new "nextgen airspace" moniker and promised very lofty things to be in place by 2020. It's now 4 years past that and we've hardly seen any of that come to fruition, aside from ADS-B which while great has also has placed quite the burden on many other areas like GA pilots, drones and RC hobbyists, all of which I'm also involved in. Some smaller, currently untowered airports would certainly benefit from this technology, but it's still far far away from being viable for any of the top 100 busiest airports in the world. I've dabbled plenty with chatgpt and Gemini and as impressive as they can be they're extremely stubborn and rigid at times, and seem completely unable to improvise in some complex situations. This could be a life and death thing in an emergency when airborne.

A digital tower should be an aid/supplement, not a total replacement of an actual control tower. (Especially on Major Airports)

Not being in the tower and able to look with your own eyes seems like asking for a digital disaster to happen with no immediate work-around. Cyber attack, power-outage and the backup fails at some point… someone’s gonna be sent running up that decommissioned tower and they’re not going to be in shape to do it.

Im sure AI assisted with human controllers would be okay. Like an extra set of digital eyes cant hurt. But still need humans as backups. Tech is prone to mistakes, crashes, errors, that sometimes arent fixed immediately like an airport would need. Id say its a fine line between mixing the two

4:53 I'm a pilot in Colorado and flying into Northern Colorado (FNL) was always interesting. It's treated like a Class D airport while not technically towered. ATC is on-site in trailers with a camera pole and they'll request you report X miles out since they don't have radar.

Remote ATC has been happening for decades. High level airspace is controlled from centers that obtain radar data from long distances away, and send/receive radio communications from remote stations long distances away. Making the out the window aspect of a control tower remote is largely a bandwidth issue. Multiple consistent, reliable HD feeds from a remote tower to a control center is no easy feat, but technology has advanced to a place where it can be done. "Automation" has also been helping make ATC more efficient and safe for a long time. Conflict detection systems, runway incursion alert systems, digital flight plan issuance have all been around for some time and help grow the capacity of ATC systems with demand. The big sticking point with automated systems is where liability lies. Some automated systems are helpful tools, but they do not remove ultimate liability/responsibility from the controller. Some automated systems can be fully relied upon instead of a procedure that was previously performed by a person. Getting "automated" systems to a point where they can be relied upon from a liability standpoint is a much higher bar than having them as helpful tools.

The first digital tower was in Sweden where we have had them for years. They work very well for our airports in the north.

Fascinating video.

I can see virtual towers on site where a normal tower sits, but it is madness to have virtual towers miles away... network connectivity is far from a sure thing, even when multiple redundancies are in place.

Makes sense. I know there's a lot of dependence upon electronics for aviation. But even still, what happens when the power is cutoff? Being able to see it yourself seems like an excellent backup plan, and would require someone be there to see what's going on.

I love that everything is becoming so digital but I feel airports are now going to get so much bigger without the towers

THE SAME REASON THIS IS A BAD IDEA is the same reason it is a BAD IDEA to paint all your car windows with black paint, attach cameras all over the car, then installing monitors in the car, and then taking the car out for a drive near a school zone when kids are getting out of school. If you find that scary, relate that same scenario to airplanes.

Give a whole new meaning to work from home

What happens when there is an outage? Or perhaps a cyber security breach? It would be much safer to use line of sight from a tower and standard radio communications to control the traffic. This seems ripe for failure. Sometimes things should stay the same. Not to say we can’t empower controllers to do an amazing job by empowering them with technology but removing them from the airport and staging 70 miles away is just asking for problems.

Whatever helps with the delays

Informative thanks

I think it’s funny they use display tablets designed for artists/designers to move around controls😅

As a 16 year veteran controller in the USA I can admit our system is saturated and frequencies are packed in the busier air spaces. And I hate to think that I can not be replaced but at the end of the day, the pavement at the airports can only handle so many planes within a limited time. We get so efficient and introduce more aircraft and sort of get back to the original delay. I’m curious to see where this goes! AI is rapidly improving.

Hey! One of my local airports was on the list at 4:44! I feel seen

Nobody thought the array of screens with large gaps between them was a window come on writers!

about time!

Given all the things happening in the Cyber world currently, I would say we still need a tower. This could be a good add-on but not an alternative.

Not sure if this new digital tower technology is very comforting,. As a passenger, I see so many things that can go wrong.

Especially if they can get multi-spectral cameras (infrared, etc.) in on the act, they'll have better visibility, WRT what is where, during adverse weather conditions. The would enhance safety, specially in nighttime, fog, etc. The next thing they need to add, and the NextGen system in the USA is supposed to provide, is digital text information between ATC computers and pilots. A pilot could notify the ATC system that, for various reasons, they can't make their takeoff slot. That open slot would be notified to all other aircraft, such that another aircraft could take that slot (such as the next in the queue, assuming they'll be ready in time) and things can move along more smoothly. Meanwhile, as various aircraft move up, a slot would open later in the queue, such that the earlier aircraft can still get one in a timely fashion. This could all be handled by computers, without needing human ATC operators getting involved. Scheduling the various flight out, queuing planes onto the taxiways, etc. could all be handled to greater degree by computers and the pilots, reducing the ATC operators' workloads. So long as digital networking tech is performant (enough bandwidth and sufficiently-low latency) and reliable, it should be possible to put the actual ATC operators just about anywhere. It might become possible to have a handful of ATC centers in an entire country (as demo'ed in Norway) coordinating all the major airports. But there would need to be redundant networking; working for internet service providers over the years, I've been amazed how many times a "cable-seeking backhoe" managed to find the actual cable providing the company's internet backbone and take them completely off the net. Having a pair of different backbone providers, through different cables, coming in through different physical routes, was the only way to avoid that.

Yeah… a remote station works great until some construction worker accidentally smucks a fiber line when doing some ditch maintenance. Hope they have numerous connections ready to go for backups.

So call centers for airplanes. How long before that's outsourced overseas?

i think that this is great but... if any power outage happens you can't see the planes... so, this should be an aid NOT a replacement. Eventually the tower will be a watch area but the main comms can happen in the digital room

What happens when a bird lands near the tower, or bad weather blocks the camera? What about when the power goes out? I can't be the only one thinking about this.

How cool and nice this looks all the AI and digital distance control. this AI/Digital tower operation is a very big risk and target too for hackers and digital warefare, they better invest good in digital security on all layers of use and training for people how to work the system safe and secure !

I think this move needs some strong pros and cons analysis. Yes shifting to full-automation will make analysis and planning more accurate and quick, but we'd be over relying on 2 things: electricity and IT. Once either of the two has a problem, there's almost nothing anyone can do in case of an emergency..?

I dont think air tower control will disappear. You always need someway to do things manually. If those system are in maintenance or fail. You need something to do by the eye.

For better visibility, identification, and logistics - great idea! But I'd never fly again if actual air or traffic ground coordination was controlled by AI or any computer. A computer can identify hazards and alert the ATC, but shouldn't make those decisions on its own. Also: want to cause some trouble? Hack one of those remote tower camera feeds and watch the economy crumble

Marvelous 😮.Unlike self driving cars ATC is definitely an area AI could extensively be used.

There is so much the FAA could do Let’s start with PDC, D- ATIS how hard can that be I can see it at smaller GA airports with high traffic But how do you keep cameras operational unless you have lots of redundancy

Centralizing the control for radio communication. 😅 "A.i"

Oh yeah, that sounds real safe cutting costs so the controllers can control aircraft from three airports at a time super smart

As an airline pilot The US ATC is already been antiquated

lol then a server goes down and chaos and death ensues… and the airport will just say “oops”

Technology will definately help the busiest airport, especially ground control. Visability on a screen will limit operations and flexibility. The use of virtual equipmeny would probably work better but wearing head gear for long periods of time would be uncomfortable. I still hold the future to be a change to aircraft capable of vertical landing and departures instead of long runways. I moved iron birds for 2o years. It will be a long long time before control towers disappear.

These remote towers may increase efficiency and safety, but occasionally electronic wonders fail. Power is lost, circuit boards short out, cables are severed, and total failure can happen. There are always redundancies built in, but the ultimate backup for air traffic control is the human eye. Heathrow would slow to a crawl without its computers, but it would still be possible to direct an individual plane to a safe landing by human effort if they can see what's going on.

There's no room for error in ATC. If one of those remote air traffic systems goes down, it can cause a collision at worst and at best, require pilots to communicate with each other on an agreed frequency instead of ATC. In the case of AI, I could see it really easily making one simple mistake and causing a collision that costs hundreds of lives.

With complex systems increasing in their complexity and the competency crisis continuing to grow, I'd be concerned about reliability, redundancy, and resiliency. Will their be a backup or failover, not if, but when things go wrong?

Good for a backup. Computers, cameras, and electronic systems always go down, always.

You still need a tower to put the camera on.

To address some questions raised here: What happens during blackout? Ever heard of batteries and generators? What if they get hacked? They are on dedicated connections, NOT connected to the internet. What about rain, snow, ice on the cameras? Wipers and heating. Fog, low visibility? Same as regular tower and humans looking out. Airport shut down, or running at reduced capacity. What if a camera fails? They have multiple overlapping cameras, so that one camera failing will not cripple the system.

Good to see unions not interfering with progress.

Its possible but the question is if you should. Cameras exist, radar exist, transponder exist. You can make a lot, when you have a lot of control and airtraffic is a highly controlled operation. You can't just put an engine on a few wings and land on an airport. The issue is that a lot of problems will occur. Because the regulating agencies won't trust it, a human still need to do stuff. Usually companies are bad at planning and they will see an operator is not fully used, they look that he will have enough work and suddenly the operators get stressed and they burn out. The tech can fail. With an tower you have windows and a battery operated handheld and you could maintain a limited service. When you have just cameras as windows, you could operate blind but this is very sketchy. The independent handheld also would work a kilometer away. When you have remote towers, this isn't an option anymore. You have 3 points that can fail. The tech at the airport could break down, the remote center can break down or the communication between them. Still an airport without workers is not possible. You need at least need security personell that could arrest someone. You could teach them to take an handheld and announce that the airport is closed. But you went from minimal operation to none. Now imagine a big emergency. Suddenly in a radius, all airports go down and you have a certain percentage of airplanes in that radius that can only land in that radius. With minimal operation, you can get them down, without having a dangoures situation. When everything is remote and you don't have the personell anymore and not enough time to get them to the airport, this is dangoures. These airplanes need to communicate between themselves and sort stuff out. There needs to be someone that takes the lead and organize everything.

I’m surprised the WSJ didn’t cover the fact that RTX is standing up a new test remote tower at ACY, in partnership with Frequentis from Austria

When the NATs system works it’s all well and good, but when it fails it’s a right mess, as it did on August 28th 2023. The incident was triggered by the inability of the Nats computer system to process unusual, but correct, data in a flight plan submitted for a plane crossing UK airspace to Paris from Los Angeles. Two waypoints with an identical code triggered a “critical exception error” that caused the primary and secondary systems to disconnect themselves and stop working. On-site technicians couldn’t resolve the issue, and the specialist engineers were working from home. It took 90 mins for an engineer to arrive on-site, and it took a further four and a half hours till the fault was resolved and UK airspace could operate at normal capacity. But the damage was done, due to safety regulations restricting staff flying hours, planes being in the wrong place, and other subsequent logistical issues, over 3000 flights in/out of the country were cancelled, 700 000 passenger’s stranded and disruption for a 3 days. A real utter calamity, and that’s the risk you run with centralised operations, yes they are more efficient, cheaper to run, but when things go South, the negative effects are more far reaching and impactful.

The new Western Sydney International Airport will have a fully digital and remote control tower

the netherlands has a remote tower for one of the airstrips

I wonder what kind of safety nets are in place.

I think this is an EXCELLENT system to augment air traffic controllers, especially in airports that are vast and busy. I am sure there are places for this. This might even be a great way to make airports without a ATC on shift be MUSH safer than having pilots land themselves at their own risk. I think this has a place but I do not think that this is a means to replace controllers in seats.

Is this to save money on the expensive large control towers? If so they can still have controllers at the airport in a cheap room with their computers.

Yea very safe. What happens when the lights go out or a monitor dies? Is everyone going to run upstairs to the analog tower.

With the implementation of ADS-B on all flights, now there is an army of people capturing radar data with USB SDR devices and we have a near world wide system monitoring every plane movement, to the exact location and starting to get all airport vehicle info too. I am one of thee radar feeders, and I feed to 5 websites where anyone can go online and see any info àbout a flight and even see the actual picture of the plane thanks to plane spotters that feed pics to online databases. Then back that to the FAA databases info and now I see a plane ahead of my house, I click on it, sée the picture, owner, speed, alt, to/from, the entire history of that plane, where it landed when and stuff. Also see any failures of certificqtes for it

Great. Build a tower and install cameras outside it

interesting they are using wacom drawing tablets

So what happens during a power outage? internet outage? or damaged camera/ computer? how will airplanes get to the ground if the only have 15 mins and all of those happened all at once?

Tech will never make it obsolete

Study the advantages and disadvantages of this technology. One major disadvantage I see is the building has no windows. That and one of these facilities is not at the airport at all. These things likely use huge amounts of electricity. What happens when the electric power fails?

I wonder what could possibly of happened when the line dropped on the graph

Best of luck US! :) We'll let you know how a few decades of this is working. Love, Norway

2:38 Hearing the CSO of the system refer to the AI as “monitoring a wide range of things simultaneously, whereas a human has to focus on particular areas” and “omnipresent” is extremely worrying! It shows both a near-total lack of understanding of how it works and a massive amount of complacency (ironically, a lack of focus on the danger). Those are two of the main ingredients for air industry disasters. The entire basis for the tech they call “AI” in these systems is that it focuses similar to a human, and lacks all forms of short and long-term memory (the “keep in mind” context of a situation). For example, an AI model will “happily” place a callsign tag on one plane crossing a runway and another tag on a plane taking off from that runway at the same time. The fact that those planes are about to collide is a prediction that we make based on external knowledge and memory that we have, which the “AI” doesn’t, so red flags are raised. AI systems *can* be designed to take this into account, such as by having a separate model trained specifically to watch for runway incursion events, but the CSO describing it as a single AI model that is “omnipresent” demonstrates that they aren’t accounting for any of the known problems, which is mind-bogglingly terrible work that will get people killed. I can easily see interview transcript being read out in a courtroom in a few years after a report digs into the gross negligence that led to hundreds of lives being lost.

I'm surprised it wasn't the case already

It probably could be done....not in the US though. In the US, the government contracts are about maximizing profit for the contractor, not delivering a real product. Plus there are other "forces at play" preventing it from happening. Hence the various US attempts have failed.

But it got the Radar for tracking the Aircraft in Airspace to smoothen the Flight ✈ Paths, takeoff and landing in all weather environment.

And is a security risk.

Unfortunately, I think this system will ultimately lead to an increase in air-traffic controller complacency due to: 1) an inunation of data coming in, and 2) an attitude of "Oh, the computer will take control of everything anyway... So I'm just gonna sit here and do nothing." Everything will work great until 5 airliners crash because the computers' A.I. had a glitch. In all reality, there are essentially four main problems in aviation today: 1) Overcrowding of takeoffs and landings 2) Non-standardized terminal and runway configurations 3) Overworked pilots and air-traffic controllers who are forced to pick up the slack due to staffing shortages 4) Haphazard interconnectivity of intermodal transportation in the local area

Automation is all good in theory ! but what if all camera goes down/destroyed/malfunction/hacked? There should always be a manual backup plan.

Internet feeds have been throttled and blocked by hackers through node attacks. This system needs a multinode live feed system to be more resistant to such attacks. The other alternative is a direct airport to airport data feed bypassing all internet nodes. Satellite direct data feeds are out of the question due to their extreme costs thought SpaceX Starlink could greatly reduce such coasts.

What they have done in UK and elsewhere is designed a system where controllers can be remote workers. Can the controller be given computers and displays so they can work from home in their pajamas?

I think it's reasonable to have concerns and be very cautious about any new technology, which should be introduced carefully. But outright rejection (per many of the comments) is, imho, naive. If we rejected all new technology which has a risk to human life (such as this one) we would not have auto-land (or even autopilot), RADAR, ILS, GPS navigation, fly-by-wire, pressurised cabins, just to name a few. And for those saying "what happens when there is an outage", that is already a potentially fatal situation even today. There will be issues, possibly bad ones,, and each time that happens the overall system improves. The pilot who does the MentourPilot RU-vid channel is excellent as describing how this happens.

As a helicopter pilot, this AI system should not ever be replacing humans in the operation loop. We are remarkably good at solving complex problems quickly, and can consider factors that any computer system may not know of. If my aircraft loses it's radio, the air traffic controller can step outside of the tower with a directional light and tell me what to do that way. These computerized systems have had notable success as an integrated component, but should not be used in replacement of controllers. And it'd be nice if they decided to pay controllers more and relax their schedules so they don't have such a high turnover rate. That might be a better solution to the shortage issue than trying to tech-bro some solution.

I still prefer conventional ATC, it’s cheap and simple to maintain. Instead of throwing fund to such advanced ATC I would like to build more runway and expand terminal.

Controllers will call for a ground stop for an hour to play Call of Duty on those setups. That would be fun.

I mean I'm an infosec dude so like I'm not against new tech in general but this seems like a way for a small internet outage to cause huge problems.

Someone, somewhere, had to code all this initially I imagine. People are smart.

What you really need is this system so they don't LOSE your luggage; NOW THAT would be an improvement.

In the case of unanticipated external consequences, force majeure, etc., analog technology still holds value. The over reliance on technology in any industry could have catastrophic consequences when the technology goes down. We cannot take away the human factor as part of the overall equation. At least not yet.

Remote control is probably safer than a fully automated operation

When the power goes out, system gets hacked or goes down... CHAOS! very very risky.. What are the safeguards?

Yeah no so fast. The recent near miss of an airline hitting the tower was narrowly averted by someone in the tower visually spotting the airplane and waving it off. The more automation, computerization etc, the more chance of issues and problems. The tower needs to stay and real people need to be in the tower keeping an eye on things.

The obvious and immediate go to question is - what about loss of electricity? This isn't a paranoid delusion it's a hard fact, sometimes there is no power where and when you need it - especially during disasters, making the disasters far worse, especially in a digital tower. While loss of power for a conventional tower would be horrific - flag signals could be implemented from tower to ground to pilot like the Navy does, but if all you have is ground level and nothing else - good luck.

Sounds like a fantastic opportunity... for hackers and bad actors. Aviation has been a gold standard of safety and reliability. Proceed carefully!

The new Western Sydney Airport will have no control tower. It will be controlled from an off site control room

Along with GPS as a primary navigation aid what happens when the power goes down. And it’s not if but when. I understand the need as well as the use of technology but our reliance on technology will cost lives particularly when you take in to consideration that the US run and rule the GPS satellites. Steam gauges and a human monitoring them will always have a place.

Fascinating technology

Why they don’t put little feet on the towers, so they move anywhere?

1:00 wow 1kHz monitors!

One major power cut and it's Tenerife all over.

agree

Trusting AI for anything when there are programmers like those of Gemini is like trusting the FAA with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion standards - someone is not going to make it - lots of someones, and then everyone will all say, "this was completely preventable".

Am I not looking in the right place? I don't see links to sources. I want to see the FAA outdated tower list (without having to search for it myself).

This sounds like a great idea in terms of helping assist humans with the increase of traffic, and adding extra tools to help increase safety; however, it sounds like an awful idea to completely eliminate the human factor for larger airports like New York and London to name a few. The second any technology fails or allows a disaster to happen all chaos will ensue as AI does not know how to handle such situations.

Let's build a tower to replace a tower! Great idea, till the power goes out and planes need to land.

How does NATCA feel about this?

Virtual towers rarely work at low traffic airports, and are not an option for high frequency intern. airports, especially during times of bad weather or traffic peaks. You can´t replace well trained and experienced ATCOs or save money by building some cameras on top of a watch tower. too many disadvantages!

That will be very useful in a power outage. /s