“As we start to get three, four and five towers in the same building, you get some benefits,” Anderson explains. London City Airport’s outsourced air traffic control tower is the first in the UK – but is unlikely to be the last. The cameras in the sky will allow controllers an even better view: users will be able to zoom in up to 30 times closer than the human eye would be able to, and at Swanwick they’ll be able to overlay radar information and other details on top of the picture, just like a video game heads-up display. “The job of the tower controller is to look at a plane out of a window, so we really need to give them a view that’s representative of the human eye,” explains Anderson. Although the camera-led tower can be little more than a pole to which the camera rig is attached, London City has elected to build a tower with a footprint 50 per cent bigger than the minimum required. The new, 50-metre-high digital tower (a magnitude of scale taller than the airport's existing 18 metre tower), which is currently being constructed at the midway point of London City’s runway, will be tested before going live in January 2020. "As a former controller myself I was a total sceptic about the concept," he continued, "but having now seen it and experienced it, I’m not only a convert, I’m utterly convinced that what they offer is something not only better, but also safer than today." The bulky tower that currently looms over the airport will be replaced by a sleek new one a fraction of the size, adorned with the latest video streaming technology. So now things are beginning to change, as the remote working revolution is coming to air traffic management.įrom January 2020, flights in and out of London City Airport won’t be guided in land by an air traffic controller in a tower on-site, but by controllers 128 kilometres away in Swanwick, Hampshire, at the headquarters of the National Air Traffic Services, or NATS, the body which oversees air traffic in the UK. It’s a system that has worked for decades, but increasingly feels outdated. In an air traffic control tower, a vast structure often found tucked away behind a terminal building, Air traffic controllers look out the window and monitor radar, conferring over radio with pilots about when and where they can take off and land. Wherever you’re flying from, whether you’re on a business trip or a holiday, your aeroplane takes off and is guided into land the same way.
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