“Cleared to land. FYI, I’m not wearing pants.”
Now I know why @ChasenSFO wants to be a controllersooo....ops normal?
Nav Canada up here in Canuckistan is also trialing virtual tower's in two different trials, looks like a pretty neat setup
Nav Canada tests remote air traffic services - Skies Mag
Using a live feed from eight cameras mounted on the Fredericton control tower, flight service specialists in Saint John are delivering a full suite of overnight aerodrome advisory services to YFC.skiesmag.com
sooo....ops normal?
JYO has been using one for a while now. Think they were the experiment in the US. @killbilly hs some stories
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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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?
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.