Read our series of interviews with the people who are making the Yocova platform come alive. Here we speak to Andy Taylor, Chief Solution Officer at NATS about digital air traffic control towers, the benefits of AI and data for air traffic controllers, and how NATS is looking to further develop this technology to benefit wider airport and airline operations.
Tell us about NATS – what does the company do?
“We’re the UK’s leading provider of air control services and we provide air traffic control for all the enroute airspace over the UK and halfway across the North Atlantic, plus the majority of large airports in the UK. Beyond that, we’ve got offices in other locations around the world such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Middle East. We’ve also invested in Searage Technologies, which is a Canadian company based in Ottawa and they provide our digital towers solutions.
Can you tell us more about the remote towers and how they work?
“Digital or remote towers have been around for a while now and have been used predominantly to augment air traffic control towers. People tend to think about digital or remote towers as an airport being controlled, not by a control tower physically on site at an airfield, but from a remote control operation room using camera views to get a full panoramic view of an airport. But it’s more than a traditional air traffic control tower used to be. It’s a much more capable solution with digitization, data, AI, and other technologies to support controllers. We’re trying to make the transition as smooth as possible by making the experience a familiar one for controllers and the setup similar, but with enhancements and the additional capabilities that the new technologies bring. For example, controllers still get the panoramic view that they got from the goldfish bowl of a traditional control tower, but rather than picking up a set of binoculars, they can now digitally select binoculars so that the experience is similar.”
Where are these remote control rooms typically housed?
“In the past, many of the international deployments have been to remote towers as a way of centralising a pool of air traffic controllers where they may previously have been working in separate towers or locations. What we’re finding now, though, is the demand to implement the technology to enhance existing onsite facilities. Airports are always changing and developing in one way or another with new facilities, taxiways, or parking stands for example. These can cause line of sight issues or create new traffic on the ground, which may create limitations in terms of what old towers can observe. By distributing panoramic camera arrays around the airport, we can bring those distant or obscured views into the tower. So, what we’re finding is that a lot of airports and air traffic providers are looking to extend the life of existing towers and its operational viability by digitizing. These ‘hybrid’ towers have already been deployed in Hong Kong, Delhi and the Middle East and we’re in the process of deploying one at Farnborough Airport in the UK.”
What can passengers look out for when travelling through, for example, Hong Kong Airport?
“As a passenger, you won’t really see any difference in terms of what’s out there on the airfield. At Hong Kong Airport, there are still traditional air traffic control towers and it’s a multi-towered airport due to its size. It is often the case that as an airport expands, a new tower will be built because of the limitations of the original optical footprint, but that does mean that the air traffic control units get split. In the case of Hong Kong airport, what they are aiming for is a more efficient operation and from our perspective, the aim is basically to provide the air traffic controller and the tower with the capability to operate as the airport changes and things such as weather conditions change so that the planned service can be delivered. To enable this, we mount cameras around the airport. These can be seen if you know what you’re looking for, but in terms of the difference passengers will notice, it’s more likely to be an improved experience as opposed to anything obvious to the eye.”
Can you tell us about augmented views and how that technology is used by controllers?
“Augmented views can be anything from resolving line of sight issues brought about by new developments such as new hangars, aprons, or taxiways, using cameras and technologies to fill in those gaps. But when you place cameras around the airport, you bring areas that are two or three kilometres from the tower into view, so actually it’s now possible for a controller to sit in a digital facility away from the airport or go hybrid in their existing tower. Take, for example, Heathrow airport, which has multiple terminals. A ground controller may want to be looking at Terminal 5 at one moment, and then at Terminal 2, which is three kilometres away. Traditionally, you would have had both terminals at some distance from the controller’s view, but in the new environment they’re close in so you get high fidelity over every single part of the airfield. Then with the augmentation, you get a display, which is effectively like looking out of the window, but you can see every detail of the aircraft, including whether the doors are closed, the gears are retracted, or it’s coming into land. You can see target label information running around those aircraft.
In a traditional tower, if you’re looking out of a standard window you might see 20 or 30 of the same aircraft type from a main carrier, queued, waiting to depart or taxi in and you have to cross-reference with a separate system to get the detail of the aircrafts you see out the window. But with the digital towers functionality, you look out the digital window using panoramic displays and have the identification and other information about the aircraft and flight displayed alongside the image. Air traffic control training requires us to keep monitoring to check safety and be able to make decisions, but with the traditional process, you constantly need to refer to what is down on the desk from other information sources. What the digital towers do is enable constant monitoring, but in a much safer and efficient way. It also reduces the amount of mental processing that a controller has to do. We can run data in real time through AI, which can provide triggers to the controller at 25 frames per second, which is something that a human cannot do. AI can take all the views, process them, and provide the controller with prompts for where to look to help inform their next decision.
Heathrow Digital Tower Lab touchscreen
What is the hardware set up for these air traffic controllers?
If you’re in a fully remote tower, you’re potentially sat in a room, rather than at the top of a tower with a bank of very large ultra-high-definition screens several metres across, providing you with the full view you’d see as if you’re looking out of the glazed windows of a control tower. You also have things like radar data, flight data, electronic strips, and ground lighting integration, which can all be displayed on that video wall. Then in the individual controller work position, there’s a personal panoramic video screen, but it sits on the desk, enabling the controller to glance up at the larger screen wall.
For controllers in hybrid towers, there’s still the glazed view across the airport for shared situational awareness with everyone else sitting in the tower, but then you also have the vertical panoramic displays at your desk showing live videos of the airfield. What you can see on your personal screen tallies up with what you can see out of the window, but on the desk display you have the enhancement overlays and distant areas brought up close, so you have a much richer view of what you can see out of the window.”
Do individual controllers prefer different or unique setups?
“We do have different configurations for different controllers depending on their area of responsibility, and we work with a group of end users in terms of designing a workstation best suited to them. These might vary for say quieter shifts when the airport is less busy, say at night-time, but we do try to keep some uniformity to it. Obviously, workstations need to be handover-ready, so they’re not entirely configurable for each user.”
Do you think the digital data from air traffic control will be used in future? If so, how?
“That’s an interesting question from the perspective of that now we’re digitized the environment, so what can we do with the data. Currently we’re looking at guidance systems, flight data and the airport operations database and how we can take all that into the digital tower platform, and the applications we can then run on that. We’re using an open platform, and we welcome the opportunity to bring other organisations in to develop applications, but we’re also developing some of our own. One of the ones we’re developing uses AI monitoring of video footage alongside radar data to check the aircraft has taxied and parked correctly to reduce the likelihood of any collision on the ground. And more broadly, we’re looking at extending the digital tower capability in terms of what it can do to help airlines and ground crews and support airport operations to work more safely and efficiently overall and break out of traditional silos. If we use Hong Kong as an example, the airport and the air traffic service provider have co-invested in the technology because they saw the benefits of doing so, both from a cost effectiveness perspective, but also for the operational benefits they receive as a result.”
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Author: Yocova, with special thanks to John Walton
Published 01 February 2024
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