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The Air Traffic Control Tower of the Future Doesn't Include Humans
CravenRaven76 writes: Sweden is testing the future of air traffic control at Ornskoldsvik Airport. An 80 foot tall unmanned tower at the airport houses 14 high-definition cameras to help controllers survey the site with better-than-human vision. Video from the cameras is transmitted to Sunvsal Airport, where a controller guides the planes. Potential future plans include grouping every airport controller together at distant facilities in order to save costs of running multiple air traffic control towers.
One controller can do the work of many.
It is just a cost saving measure. Not a safety one.
Either from a technical glitch, power outage, or whatever.
Seems like that would make it vulnerable to malicious hackers. Just like self-driving cars, it sounds like an asinine idea.
It would seem being an air traffic controller would be an easily automated task.
Computers are good at doing things that it has been programmed to do. When everything goes as plan, nothing unpredicted happened, everything will be fine. But when some unpredicted situation appears, unforseen bad weather, failing engine or equipement on board of an airplane, an object on the runway, you name it, that's where the computer will fail. And those are the moments when the judgement of a person, an aircontroller, is needed. An unmanned air traffic control tower? I'm not sure, but it sounds like a recipe for accidents to me.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
send bruce willis? he's already getting to old for that skiten.
SAAB Australia and Airservices Australia are currently working on a remote tower trial for Alice Springs airport. The controllers will be approximately 1300 km away in Adelaide.
Örnsköldsvik.
Sundsvall.
How hard can it be?
I think sometimes need to use fake addresses, because the risk of leaks if we use real address
Nice to see a story about stuff around my neighbourhood. Too bad they got the name wrong tho :(
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Remote ATC controllers are very common in Canada and USA (Peterborough for example). How is this anything new?
Nav Canada has had ATC controllers sit in the ATC facility at Pearson airport while controlling multiple other airports for years or maybe decades. This is very common practice and all pilots know what an RCO is.
The only difference I can spot here is they get webcams. That's hardly an important bit as the ATC never has to have visual of the plane. In a controlled airport the pilot just has to declare I have visual and thats good enough. Works similarly for taxiing aircraft.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
and try to make half as many air traffic controllers do twice the work.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Will still need humans around to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_down_aircraft_landing
How will the computers give directions to pilots that have landed their planes successfully but got lost on the way to the gate? Apparently it does happen.
Or the instructions are given but the pilot doesn't understand the accent they were given in? The computer might just repeat the same thing over again which may not help. Whereas a human ATC is likely to try to say it in other ways.
Definitely wouldn't be able to replace some of these: http://footflyer.com/Articles/JustForFun/AviationHumor/air_traffic_controllers.htm ;)
You need at least one human, because dogs can't open cans of food for themselves.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alice Springs in Australia has been testing this system for a few years. Unfortunately I'm not sure how it worked out as I am no longer working in the field.
The Alice airport has an interesting problem. Basically there aren't a lot of flights and in a normal situation the airport would not have tower controllers. However the flights that are there tend to come in dense waves, so the risk is higher than the average numbers would indicate and they had to have a controller. I also believe that they lost money on the airport because fees are charged per plane that lands.
The hope of the remote system is that they could have a team on staff for the few hours a day that control was required and the rest of the time the airport would run uncontrolled and the staff could be utilised elsewhere.
> Video from the cameras is transmitted to Sunvsal Airport, where a controller guides the planes.
Corrected for you:
Video from the cameras is transmitted to Sunvsal Airport, where a swedish controller thinks (s)he guides the planes, but in fact the link has been hijacked by a russian military affiliated cyber-crime gang, who are placing planes on collision path for fun, profit and greater glory of the motherland. In other words: Input - Output is now Putin - Putout.
This is not ATC ... it's airport ground control... it would be idiotic to try to perform ATC seperation using cameras only...
s/Sunvsal/Sundsvall/ s/Ornskoldsvik/Örnsköldsvik/
Because they need to relay verbal commands and respond to certain calls which may not be easily recognisable.
Have you ever heard how garbled a radio is? Imagine running voice recognition on that.
This. Remember the first indicator they had of an airplane hijacking on September 11 was a garbled transmission. An automated ATC probably wouldn't have realized what it was.
Because yet another task is being shoved off to pilots by a government that can't write a budget properly and is always short on the money required to have an effective traffic control system.
So, they pass an edict requiring ADS-B, effectively shoving air traffic control off to pilots to "self-manage."
Remote Tower is not the same as "Doesn't Include Humans". The way Saab treats their Air Traffic business units, I wouldn't be surprised if this fell apart. They need to start investing in it instead if sucking it dry.
It would seem being an air traffic controller would be an easily automated task.
Lots of things seem simply to people unfamiliar with the task. In reality air traffic control is a very complex and high stress job. Remember that any automated system has to account for ALL the corner cases and weird situations that might occur because it is very literally a matter of life and death. If it was easy to automate air traffic control it would have already been automated. Humans are in the loop precisely because it is not a trivial task to automate and because humans (flawed though we are) are very flexible and adaptable to unusual situations.
For example think about little things. How do you have an automated system that knows when there is too much ground fog to release planes for takeoff? Not an easy thing to automate. It's not just knowing where the planes are but also what conditions they are dealing with. You also have to communicate all that data to the ATC system in both directions and we simply don't have the technology to do that efficiently right now.
That's not to say we shouldn't have a goal of automating air traffic control. We absolutely should automate it where possible. But it is not even close to being trivial to automate.
Get rid of air traffic controllers and pilots, and flying might become a relatively pleasurable undertaking. These prima donnas are outliving their usefulness very quickly, and these days they are good mostly to keep the rest of us hostage to their increasingly ridiculous demands.
Fire all air traffic controllers, and we don't need no replacements!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What happens when - not if - the control tower is hacked, and there are no humans there to take over?
What happens when - not if - the State now that it is possible to do so gives itself the right to control all aircraft landings in the name of security and safety, and so extends its power to control the actual physical landing of all aircraft in the country?
Remember also this will happen with cars, too, when they become driven by software, so the State will also have given itself the right to control the movement of every car in the country.
Remember also that in the last ten years, the State - without asking or debate - gave itself the right (duly exercised) to record all communications.
It will come to pass you will *not be permitted* to own a car or aircraft which is *not subject to direct control by the State*, in the name of safety and terrorism.
Here we see another example of a trade being wiped out by machines. It is fine and wonderful but society still takes no efforts at all to come up with ways to help people whose careers come to a sudden end. Air controllers are a skilled group but endless retraining is no longer a real answer. We must support workers as technology displaces them.
The planes will probably be flying themselves by that time too.
Really, this thing better be backed up to the hilt, 'cuz if it went down and all ATC were to cease, those planes aloft would be unlikely to be able to coordinate themselves to a safe landing and not be hitting each other.
Clearly, it's more cost-effective to run a single, huge air traffic control center in New Delhi or Mumbai for the entire planet than individual air traffic controllers scattered about. I hope pilots will be able to understand the thick accents.
Because nobody will have jobs.
Please name one airport that has regular passenger jet service and doesn't have ATC tower service (radar or not is irrelevant in the context).
Here's a few to start; there are lots more:
UNV
HDN
GUC
MTJ
ACV
CEC