Your Air Traffic Controller Could be a Hundred Miles Away
- Saab, Thales say remote towers can replace human controllers
- Technology tested at U.S., Australia, Sweden, Ireland runways
Air traffic controllers inside the Remote Tower Centre in Sundsvall, Sweden.
Souce: Saab ABThis article is for subscribers only.
The world’s airlines have ambitious plans to double the fleet of commercial jets during the next two decades as the number of air travelers approaches 7 billion. The trouble: There won’t be enough controllers to help those 44,000 planes take off and land safely.
A shortage of air traffic controllers may rein in expansion by the aviation industry and economic development by emerging nations such as India, which wants to activate hundreds of unused runways to spur growth. There is a potential solution, and it resembles a video gamer’s dream -- a wall of big-screen TVs and a few tablet computers controlled by a stylus.