London City Airport - Tower is now remoted 90 miles away

Nav Canada up here in Canuckistan is also trialing virtual tower's in two different trials, looks like a pretty neat setup

 
Nav Canada up here in Canuckistan is also trialing virtual tower's in two different trials, looks like a pretty neat setup


Honestly you start tying these systems together with sensor fusing between visual sources like video/Flir and meta data from stuff like flightaware/ADSB tracks and then project it in a 3D environment, it’s hard to argue 2 guys in the tower are not the inferior option.


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JYO has been using one for a while now. Think they were the experiment in the US. @killbilly hs some stories

They activated full remote ops last Monday. Once they got the radio levels sorted out it has been pretty solid. Much better since they have two guys in the tower working ground/tower separately vs. one poor bastard in the horse trailer. It's a pretty cool looking system but it will be vastly improved once they have radar and/or some kind of data link. Right now it's eyeballs and cameras. The good news is that their ground coverage of the ramp is much, much better than it was.

I'm not telling any stories here because there are people who seem to do that well enough for me on other forums/media. Saves me the trouble. See "Self Immolation On Forums" thread for tangential but related content.

Today will be the first nice Sunday afternoon with good flying weather in a while, so that's going to be the real test of everyone's mettle.
 
IDK ... I’m not personally a fan of automation having experienced too many failures over the years in a different venue.

Task saturation (the need to check four different programs to pinpoint a cell call, for example), network failure (from local to regional to provider-wide), everything from falling trees to chewing mice to pole fires and contractors who dig in the work place, microwave failure between towers, weather (all the way to the sun with solar flares) ... the causes can be nearly endless.

It could take 90 minutes for Verizon to diagnose how to work around an issue and to transfer 911 calls to our backup PSAP (which was just 3 miles distant) - much longer if the diagnosis required a tech/IT support to visit our building because it couldn’t be done remotely. Before I left we had six 911 landline trunks for which Verizon was responsible that ran through two ”switching“ terminals (one in Westchester and one in Rockland County). It was FAR more than simply throwing a switch to regain service if it went down. Our six cell trunk lines were dependent upon individual carriers AND Verizon and all of them, more than once, had network issues that would knock them out of service.

I absolutely can’t imagine what it will take to fully protect (if that’s even possible) local infrastructure (phone lines for voice and video, other information), radio towers, local equipment, and so forth from the vagaries of nature, parts failure, chewing mice, and ill-willed people, and the time required to troubleshoot issues and get systems back online from a ninety mile distance.

Automation and CAD, etc., are nice as long as they are no glitches or failures. While those may not happen OFTEN, they do occur with more regularity than one might guess. Could be I’m just old, but this doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Offered (mostly) tongue-in-cheek:

110F3C1A-A959-43CA-9E47-1814BAAACE61.jpeg
 
IDK ... I’m not personally a fan of automation having experienced too many failures over the years in a different venue.

Task saturation (the need to check four different programs to pinpoint a cell call, for example), network failure (from local to regional to provider-wide), everything from falling trees to chewing mice to pole fires and contractors who dig in the work place, microwave failure between towers, weather (all the way to the sun with solar flares) ... the causes can be nearly endless.

It could take 90 minutes for Verizon to diagnose how to work around an issue and to transfer 911 calls to our backup PSAP (which was just 3 miles distant) - much longer if the diagnosis required a tech/IT support to visit our building because it couldn’t be done remotely. Before I left we had six 911 landline trunks for which Verizon was responsible that ran through two ”switching“ terminals (one in Westchester and one in Rockland County). It was FAR more than simply throwing a switch to regain service if it went down. Our six cell trunk lines were dependent upon individual carriers AND Verizon and all of them, more than once, had network issues that would knock them out of service.

I absolutely can’t imagine what it will take to fully protect (if that’s even possible) local infrastructure (phone lines for voice and video, other information), radio towers, local equipment, and so forth from the vagaries of nature, parts failure, chewing mice, and ill-willed people, and the time required to troubleshoot issues and get systems back online from a ninety mile distance.

Automation and CAD, etc., are nice as long as they are no glitches or failures. While those may not happen OFTEN, they do occur with more regularity than one might guess. Could be I’m just old, but this doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Offered (mostly) tongue-in-cheek:

View attachment 58965

There is no question in it being reasonable to have a reservation for the Murphy factor. Yes it would absolutely suck to lose hours of operation at a major airport because some rodent chewed through a braided cable in a black box amongst miles of cables....

That said, we live far more comfortable as a 1st world society already relying on “electronic perfection“ in so many ways, this is just a drop in the bucket of places it can go wrong. If it weren’t for that, we’d have a lot more traffic cops out directing traffic in intersections.

I look at tech like this and what it can bring in SA and see a real chance at preventing a catastrophe because now with sensor fusing. I mean you could go full down the rabbit hole of “what could be” and imagine a remote controller seeing the airport environment in a 3D overlay and find a problem before it starts, using some sort of 3D imagine and stylus/minority report glove to make corrective changes, and issuing active taxi instructions to an aircraft that networking allows to see in their hud. Or we can read a series of complicated instructions to a guy that may be speaking a second language, and then watch them taxi in crappy vis to see if they really did copy what you told them.


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There is no question in it being reasonable to have a reservation for the Murphy factor. Yes it would absolutely suck to lose hours of operation at a major airport because some rodent chewed through a braided cable in a black box amongst miles of cables....

That said, we live far more comfortable as a 1st world society already relying on “electronic perfection“ in so many ways, this is just a drop in the bucket of places it can go wrong. If it weren’t for that, we’d have a lot more traffic cops out directing traffic in intersections.

I look at tech like this and what it can bring in SA and see a real chance at preventing a catastrophe because now with sensor fusing. I mean you could go full down the rabbit hole of “what could be” and imagine a remote controller seeing the airport environment in a 3D overlay and find a problem before it starts, using some sort of 3D imagine and stylus/minority report glove to make corrective changes, and issuing active taxi instructions to an aircraft that networking allows to see in their hud. Or we can read a series of complicated instructions to a guy that may be speaking a second language, and then watch them taxi in crappy vis to see if they really did copy what you told them.


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Only somewhat related, I love taxi instructions in ICN. “Follow the greens” and the taxi centerline lights in front of you light up. It’s a glorious thing.
 
The technology advancement seems to be explained well, but why remote? It seems Heathrow is being discussed too. Why couldn't they implement the technology at the airport instead of building it 115km away?
 
The technology advancement seems to be explained well, but why remote? It seems Heathrow is being discussed too. Why couldn't they implement the technology at the airport instead of building it 115km away?

so they can put the controllers for a bunch of airports in one spot is my guess.
 
Since this thread came up I'll post an update....

JYO tower ops have now moved to a building down the street. They rely on the cameras, clocks, and good ol' know-how. Radar feeds are coming. As it was explained to me, they will only have primary target and they will not be able to manipulate the data block associated with the target. But when they see multiple airplanes coming in to JYO from the W/NW all squawking 1226, they'll have a much better picture of SA. Don't know when that will take place.

For the most part, operations have been very good and safe. The tower is somewhat limited in what it can and can't do by the FAA, and it's a bit odd for some pilots to wrap their heads around a towered Class G airport under a Bravo shelf that feels/works like a Delta. Presumably it will be re-charted as a Delta but I suspect it will be years before that happens. Still, with the increasing levels of 91/135 jet/charter traffic and FIVE operational flight schools, I imagine some expansion will be in order. Especially if the NIMBYS trying to close GAI get their way.

The controllers - who work for the contractor - have been really good. We've had some snags here and there but we've managed to work them out and there are good communication paths between the controllers, the airport tenants/operations and the FAAST group. Radar and (I hope) ADS-B feeds will be a huge help. Dedicated Clearance Delivery frequency or at least separating full route clearances from the tower freq on busy days would really help, too, but those are manageable spikes.
 
There’s been talk of this at the TRACON level from what I’ve heard. With the talk being U90 ops moving entirely to P50. Hence why when the new tower went up at TUS, there wasn’t a TRACON built in conjunction; it’s still located in its old small building next door at DMA. Not sure the latest on this.
 
There’s been talk of this at the TRACON level from what I’ve heard. With the talk being U90 ops moving entirely to P50. Hence why when the new tower went up at TUS, there wasn’t a TRACON built in conjunction; it’s still located in its old small building next door at DMA. Not sure the latest on this.

apparenrlt there’s something like 13 or 15 consolidation projects in the planning. Kind of ironic when the whole reason of not doing that in the first place was so if something happened it didn’t take out too much airspace at once. Like imagine if the make a Northeast TRACON going from DC to Boston and then something like what happened in Chicago a few years ago happens? Hell, the whole reason thr ARTCC’s and TRACONs have to be a certain distance apart was to keep them apart from the same nuke blast.
 
apparenrlt there’s something like 13 or 15 consolidation projects in the planning. Kind of ironic when the whole reason of not doing that in the first place was so if something happened it didn’t take out too much airspace at once. Like imagine if the make a Northeast TRACON going from DC to Boston and then something like what happened in Chicago a few years ago happens? Hell, the whole reason thr ARTCC’s and TRACONs have to be a certain distance apart was to keep them apart from the same nuke blast.

How has consolidation been working overall for SoCal TRACON, for example. When Los Angeles, Ontario, San Diego, and Coast TRACONs were all combined? Or NorCal TRACON when Monterey, Stockton, Sacramento and Bay TRACONs were combined. How have those been working out?

Both of these facilities have been in service for a couple of decades, have there been lessons learned that can be applied to new facilities wishing to do consolidation, even if they did that with the whole of the northeast?
 
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