Virtual Tower

Transforming conventional towers to Virtual Towers

Building on this, DLR researchers have asked themselves: What if the entire Controller Work Position (CWP), including the view out of the window and all other necessary workstation systems and interactions, were deployed in a virtual environment?

DLR researchers are now working on a Virtual Tower concept, which provides a remote tower CWP wirelessly, anywhere, using standard and affordable virtual reality glasses. With such a system, controllers are not tied to a physical tower anymore. Wherever they have internet access, in a RTC, at home, across borders, around the world, the controller or aerodrome flight information service officer (AFISO) could provide air traffic services wherever and whenever needed.

Advantages for smaller airports and flight operations

Such a Virtual Tower setup can offer controllers many advantages in their daily operations especially at smaller airports:

• Utilise time zone advantages: During the day at Geneva airport the controller can take over the night traffic from Melbourne airport to avoid unpleasant night shifts in Melbourne and vice versa 12 hours later in order to avoid unpleasant night shifts for Geneva.
• Night shifts from home: A controller can control the only night flight at his airport from home and does not have to drive to the ATC tower in the middle of the night.
• Flexibility in an emergency: In an emergency, a controller can ask another controller for help, who will connect virtually.
• Customised ATC service: At airports with aerodrome flight information services, higher ATC services could be provided when needed by just calling a free controller colleague, who can take over the flight in question.
• Extended opening hours: Aerodrome flight information service officers can also share their shifts with other officers at low-density airports to extend the opening hours of these airports during off-peak periods.

Low hardware and infrastructure requirements

Airport operators no longer have to worry about maintaining a tower building or even CWP hardware, because there is no longer any CWP hardware except for the glasses. This makes the user interface easy to harmonise across all units. Interface adaptations or software updates can be installed on all the glasses at the same time and the controllers always have the same user interface, regardless of which airport they are at.

The hardware and infrastructure requirements are extremely low: The Virtual Tower concept consists of a basic video panorama using low-cost camera sensors, a standard state-of-the-art pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera, a processing computer and a virtual reality environment (VR headset). The VR headset is used to display the video panorama and PTZ streams, to control the PTZ camera via a head tracking function and to provide radio communication, airport ambient sound and all necessary human-machine interactions, such as: electronic flight processing system, weather, communication or light panel systems. And all of this with very low hardware costs (less than 15,000 euros) and very low bandwidth requirements, which can even be transmitted using mobile phone networks.