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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.
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.
I think sometimes need to use fake addresses, because the risk of leaks if we use real address
Seems like that would make it vulnerable to malicious hackers
It doesn't need to be.....it doesn't even need to be connected to the internet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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."
It's likely that they would just use Internet. Private circuits are rare these days.
But the subject line states "The Air Traffic Control Tower of the Future Doesn't Include Humans".
So who or what are those "controllers" in Adelaide? Aliens? Robots?
This is not about taking humans out of the loop, but simply consolidation to save money. Sickening.
And let's not even talk about safety. Because the workload and stress for those one or two controllers controlling several airports will go up dramatically.
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.
The headline is consistent with the article, which does not say there were no humans involved.
At the Ornskoldsvik Airport, one control tower has nobody inside. However, the tower continues to perform its job of guiding planes to the ground safely. The person who controls the landing is in another complex, roughly 90 miles away. That individual has access to cameras which reportedly function better than the average human eye.
That is, the tower building is not manned but there is still a human controller or controllers. Precisely what is being trialled in Alice Springs only with longer distances. It is partly about consolidating the controllers in a less remote area: easier to get people to live there, more likely to retain experienced staff, easier to maintain training currency. This is similar to the existing concentrations of sector controllers in Brisbane and Melbourne, only with different sensor inputs.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Not really, in Sweden it's quite cheap to lease a dedicated line. The price point for 1Gbit/s is less than $4000/month.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Agreed and this is where I see good potential. There are many, many airports and airstrips around the world used very infrequently. Some I have visited cannot stay open at all without local government support. Paying full time staff to help land one plane a day is a huge inefficiency that this solves.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
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.
In this industry they are more common than you think. I don't work directly in ATC, but I do work at the old SABRE building and we manage several large airline systems...from the PCs to the kiosk, os390's and IBM Z mainframes. Many sites have private circuits as redundants and now use VPNs across the net, but just this morning we had to have some clients switch over to the private circuits to get into a particular data center. Many airports have them linking back to various data centers, but they don't use them except in the even of the primary VPN failing.
I guarantee it will be though. All the reservation, maintenance and engineering (M&E), various FTP / SAP / Oracle / IIS etc is all connected through the internet. But all that stuff is strictly AA, USAIR, etc equipment and I don't know about the companies that run the ATC.
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.
Fire all air traffic controllers, and we don't need no replacements!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
You don't need to be a skilled hacker to royally mess up ATC.
All you need is a sufficiently high powered radio transmitter tuned to ATC frequencies. The kind you find in light aircraft may be sufficient. I don't recommend it though as you will piss of a lot of people that hold various kinds of badges that all mean trouble in this situation.
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.
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
This is not ATC ... it's airport ground control... it would be idiotic to try to perform ATC seperation using cameras only...
Ground Control is ATC, and it's also one of the most dangerous areas.