Weekly review #99 - 19th May

Picture of Vincent Lambercy
Posted by Vincent Lambercy

Do you remember the news a few weeks ago that London City airport was announced as the first major airport controlled by a remote digital tower

 

NATS’ air traffic control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire use an ‘enhanced reality’ view supplied by a state-of-the-art 50m digital control tower. And, they've excelled themselves once again by making London City's digital tower all-weather ready. 

 

Over many months, using recordings from the camera systems and data from the weather logs, NATS compiled case studies of all the met events the CAA and Met Office required. And then spent many hours studying these to assess the performance of the system and collate training material. 

 

To make sure the images on the screens allowed them to do the met assurance observations and provide the ATC service, they spent a lot of time fine-tuning the image, and after a lot of work, gained approval for providing met and the ATC service using the digital tower! 

 

Excellent work! And so exciting for the future of remote digital tower capabilities. 

 

We're also very excited by the news of enhanced operational efficiency for regional airports becoming a reality

 

For the last few years, a ‘simplified’ concept has been studied at EUROCONTROL through SESAR trials that would offer the benefits of A-CDM for regional airports, without the complexity of delivering the full picture, yet more developed than an advanced ATC-Tower.

 

Now more than ever in these tough times for the airport industry, further network integration of airports is a key success factor to prepare for future capacity management.

 

With the willingness of EUROCONTROL to support this integration, A-CDM for regional airports has become an essential solution to meet this objective and is actively being studied across the industry.

 

We can't wait to see how this develops! 

Airports news

Market news

Context information

Reports and data

  • EUROCONTROL Data Snapshot #10 - Our tenth EUROCONTROL Data Snapshot is here and our focus is on the overload on the use of Surveillance Radar.
  • Pandemic spurs innovativ at DFS - DFS controlled 1.46 million flights last year – the lowest number ever and 56.2 percent fewer than in 2019 (3.3 million). Overall, take-offs and landings at the 16 designated international airports fell by 58.7 percent. 
  • Fraport Traffic Figures – April 2021: Passenger Traffic Still Low at Frankfurt Airport - Frankfurt’s strong cargo growth continues unabated – Passenger traffic at the Group airports worldwide remains well below pre-pandemic levels. With 15,486 takeoffs and landings, aircraft movements rose by 137.8 percent compared to April 2020.

Research and innovation

  • Digitalisation in air traffic management – the Polish touch - Digitalisation is the best way to make air traffic management more efficient, believes Jarosław Piełunowicz, PANSA, who is leading research into a number of automation solutions to support controllers in their work, as part of the SESAR JU’s flagship projects, PROSA (PJ.10) and 4DSkyways (PJ18W2). In this article, he gives an update on the projects’ work and how they are supporting the move to a digital European sky.

UAV and UTM

 

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