Thunderstorm18 wrote:
Two: no mater how many cameras/ webcams, you will put on an airport, it will allays be a point that you will not cover.
At LHBP you can see more parts of the airport from the remote control tower than the actual one, save the interior of the tower.
Rwy20 wrote:
alioth wrote: The whole thing was automatic.Makes you wonder why you couldn’t automate it a bit more and just write “Everyone flying in tomorrow is welcome to land” on that website. Or turn it around and write “everyone is always welcome to land, unless we publish a NOTAM to the contrary”.
This is essentially how it works at the Swiss grass airfield where I’m based. The airfield is PPR. The web site has a big coloured box and a small street light at the corner. The box is red, yellow, or green with text indicating any specific restrictions or relevant info (e.g. yellow, with comment open only for heli’s or ski-planes …. typical for a few days after a winter snowfall). There is also a PPR telephone number with the statement that if the answering machine refers the caller to the web site and the status there is OPEN, then that qualifies as a positive answer to the PPR request.
Interesting.
If I’ve caught all the comment details correctly there are a lot of tests and plans, but in fact only 2 airfields are fully operational (not test) with remote ATC as of today:
- ESNO Ornskoldsvik in Sweden
- LHBP Budapest-Ferihegy in Hungary
Anyone have any more to add or ones that I missed? It would also be interesting to know the date they went fully operational.
It sounds like a few of the tests are close to completion and this list could well change quite a bit by Jan 1, 2018 if the announced schedules don’t slip. Some of these were announced back in 2015 and we are now mid-2017. Like avionics product announcements, we seem to get into a mind set that announced availability date means delivered date which is definitely mostly not the case. But for this list, it would be nice to know the current, not future, fully operational status.
chflyer wrote:
- LHBP Budapest-Ferihegy in HungaryAnyone have any more to add or ones that I missed? It would also be interesting to know the date they went fully operational.
LHBP temote tower
This article here, may provide additional information on the topic.
They show also the Hungaro Control ATC workstation.
Stephan_Schwab wrote:
For some reason governments feel the need to regulate small air transport instead of leaving it to those involved but for car transport the infrastructure gets created with public funds and no limitations are set for its use.
There’s loads of regulations on car transport.
I feel the most onerous regulations for flying (at least in Britain) are imposed not by the CAA or any government body, but airport operators, e.g very short opening hours with forms that have to be sent by post days in advance (plus a fee) if you want to fly in after the office has closed in the afternoon, lots of weird procedures requiring not just a NOTAM check before you go, but also a good look at the airfield’s website, odd booking out rules for certain times of the day (e.g Blackpool about a year ago) plus then you have to phone ahead to ask to be allowed to use the airfield.
They seem to be aiming for big airports with this, not providing affordable ATC (and thus enabling IAPs which remain almost impossible in the UK otherwise) to small ones.
FYI, the first remote tower in France should be set up at Tours LFOT. It would allow the occasional airliner to operate while leaving the field uncontrolled the rest of time.
tschnell wrote:
The only way I can imagine this investment to be profitable (i.e. being cheaper to operate than an on-site TWR in the long run) is one controller working multiple airports simultaneously. Wonder if DFS or any other ANSP is planning on doing this?
LeSving wrote:
That is the main idea. Most of the smaller airports only have activity within short time frames (1 hour or less) a coupe of times each day. One controller can all alone do multiple such small airports. The main architecture is a RTC (Remote Tower Center) controlling several airports. Avinors RTC is placed in Bodø.
As someone who has had direct experience of “remote monitoring” in a different area of critical operations, where someone is overlooking more than one project realtime, this REALLY worries me. Getting a “picture” of what is happening in more than one place with different operating parameters is not an easy thing to do and I have seen first hand how instructions can easily get mixed up and how the wrong instruction can be given to a project based on the situation at a different location.
This is not the same as having dedicated ATC team for one airport only but just in a different location – as per the London City project.
Regards, SD..
