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.

Comments

So not better just cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

One controller can do the work of many.
It is just a cost saving measure. Not a safety one.

Re:So not better just cheaper

[RogueyWon]

It can be both. I've worked in the aviation field and come across quite a few of the issues associated with this.

There are now some seriously busy ATC sectors around the globe; the ones around New York and London are probably the busiest, but there are plenty of others. The problem's a growing one; while global aviation demand fell during the early years of the recession, it is spiking back sharply now and looks set to continue to grow.

Without the IT systems that have already been brought in, management of some of the throughput rates in those very busy sectors today would be pretty much impossible. Going forward, more advanced systems are going to be needed to help manage down the potential for human error as things get very difficult indeed; take a look at London's airspace systems (with traffic flows from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City and Southend all requiring management to maintain both throughputs and separations.

The risk comes from deskilling. No automation system is perfect and, in a safety critical sector like aviation, you need to be able to avoid compromising safety when systems fail. That might not require maintaining those throughput rates (realistically, you are going to accept flight delays and cancellations when you get a major IT failure), but it does involve being able to get aircraft that are in the air onto the ground safely.

To date, these issues have been managed. A major computer failure in the UK earlier this year was managed safely. But as you reduce the number of operators and, in many cases, shift their role to the management of IT systems rather than the management of air traffic, you have to face a real concern about how you keep the skills required to cope when things go wrong.

It's a tough one. But the industry is aware of it. Genuine cost-stripping is very rare in the aviation industry; it has a safety culture like nothing else I've ever seen.

Re:So not better just cheaper

[RabidReindeer]

De-skilling is a major issue. In more than one field, we've cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder by outsourcing and/or automating the simpler tasks. But it's practice on the simpler tasks that eventually make you an expert. Maybe in some fields, it's acceptable to dispense with experts (if the state of modern software is any indication), but I'm not so sure that dispensing with experts in the arena of Air Traffic Control is something people are going to want.

What happens when video is lost?

[Snotnose]

Either from a technical glitch, power outage, or whatever.

Re: What happens when video is lost?

[marciot]

They just tell the planes to stop where they are and hold on until they can correct the problem.

Unpredicted situations

[Aethedor]

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.

Re:Unpredicted situations

[Aethedor]

No. I'm a 39 year old IT security professional. Seen a lot of systems, seen a lot of code, seen a lot of things going wrong. Simply because of this. This is more than 30 years of computer experience speaking. Back to you.

Re:Why human in the loop?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's "Sundsvall", not "Sunvsal".

[Trracer]

Nice to see a story about stuff around my neighbourhood. Too bad they got the name wrong tho :(

How is this news?

[mnmn]

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.

Re:Why human in the loop?

[Sun]

Aireplane: "Mayday mayday mayday"
Computer: "You seem to be writing a letter!"