The digitisation of air traffic management and air traffic control towers is one of the technological changes in aviation most strongly accelerated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and travel shutdown. Expanding swiftly beyond the rural and remote airports where they were first implemented, digital air traffic control towers — whether entirely digital or supplementally so — are the future of airports. We talked with Andy Taylor, chief solutions officer for digital towers at air traffic management specialists NATS, to learn more.
Digital towers, Taylor tells us, are “more than just about remoting an air traffic control service from an airport in a remote area to a centralised location. That’s one use case: there are many, many more.”
Indeed, he says, digital towers are “actually about using the data that we’ve got, combining that with a broadening of that data, because in the tower control environment, probably about seventy percent of the data that controllers use currently is from observations out of the window of the control tower. That, effectively, is very labour intensive in terms of humans observing a 360-degree view and maintaining that while everything’s moving.”
From a human factors perspective, high-intensity airport operations today are already either at or approaching the limit of how much information controllers can take in, process and use. To add additional data sources or parameters, some computer assistance will inherently be required.
As an air traffic controller, “you don’t have eyes in the back of your head,” Taylor quips. “But you certainly do when you have a 360-degree panoramic array of cameras, data coming in fused with radar data, ADS-B, information from the airport operations, computer systems, CDM [collaborative decision-making] systems, electronic flight data — you have a huge matrix then.”
Adding situational awareness to the matrix, as well as views of distant airfield locations or adding in views of obscured spots, is highly beneficial for controllers.
“Digitising that view, and then using that digitisation,” Taylor says, are critical: “not just to present it to the controllers, but to present it to things like artificial intelligence, so that we’re able to simultaneously process things that a single human or even a team of humans would be stretched to do, and provide them with prompts in terms of what they need to focus on next.”
Training and safety are key wins for digitisation here
One of the key safety risks identified — and mitigated — by the industry around the COVID-19 pandemic was skill fade, where expertise normally honed by recency and recurrence starts to lose its edge.
Digital towers help here, Taylor tells us. “Anything that helps in terms of the amount of training time required is definitely going to be something which is valuable for the future. If we ever had to face something like COVID again, where you have that skill fade, by reducing the amount of training required, and having support systems, that certainly can help restore the capability of the system very quickly — and the individuals within.”
Fundamentally, he notes, “it’s all very easy to get focused on the efficiency side of things, but the number one priority of an air traffic service provider, and airports, is actually to keep people safe. All of these systems are about assurance and providing that safety.”
While there is no replacement for the skills of an air traffic controller, the depth of their training or the breadth of their experience, systems-based alerts and recommendations are a key path towards both improving safety and operational efficiency.
“We want the operations to be able to be more complex, to be more flexible, so that they can be more efficient,” Taylor says. “That can mean more movements, it can mean reduced fuel burn, reduced emissions, but all of those things do make it more complicated. As soon as you move off of a standardised conveyor belt, the decisions become wider, greater, faster.”
“We’ve actually seen things in terms of technology moving even faster than we anticipated,” Taylor tells us. “Certainly within the first year of COVID, we saw things in our technology and supporting side of the business where we were incredibly busy helping various organisations in the UK and beyond planning for their future. That planning has now turned to deployments and detailed system design.”
There’s a strong near-term argument for enhancing physical towers
Where early trials and implementations of digital tower technology were in remote and little-used airports, examples such as London City’s now all-digital tower have mainstreamed these innovations throughout air traffic management.
“You definitely are looking at digitisation on site,” Taylor says, noting that the trends are towards “enhancing what control controllers and operations rooms look like today, in terms of the support for the controllers, and those ops rooms.”
That’s especially true around the way that existing control towers can be updated, extending the life of assets, reducing the carbon cost of building new heavy physical structures, and making the system work more efficiently throughout.
“Certainly I don’t see anybody building a new physical control tower, as you’ve seen them in the past,” Taylor predicts. “I think if they take the approach to build physical towers, then they will certainly have digital hybrid capability within them. And otherwise, I think we’ll see a move towards fully digital control centres. That can be a centre where there are multiple airports within it, as we’re seeing happening, but I’d say that’s particularly around the remote case. I think those centres can be at airports where we remove the silos that currently are even between the air traffic control tower and the airport operations centre.”
Those silos are a blocker to more efficient operations, since various parts of the system quite literally see different pictures to other parts of the system. The industry needs to — and in some cases is — moving towards a more shared experience to make transitions between the various phases of air traffic control smoother.
“There’s a real opportunity here that,” Taylor suggests, “by 2025, every apron tower, every air traffic control tower, every airport operation centre has exactly that same shared experience, and is able to work together in a way that we just didn’t in 2019. The capabilities are here, and that’s what we’re helping a lot of people to deploy.”
Author: John Walton
Published 4th April 2023
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