Digital control tower questions answered

A digital tower has to be approved by the FAA before it provides air traffic control at a US airport, and each supplier is at its own stage. General Aviation designs its system against FAA digital tower requirements for class D VFR tower service and lists FAA system design evaluation at the William J. Hughes Technical Center, Atlantic City, on its compliance path.

Ask any supplier which FAA approvals it holds today and which are in progress, and check the answer with your FAA Airports District Office.

General Aviation publishes the areas it designs to: visual requirements (a 360° view at 25 Hz or more, under one second of latency, 7× magnification), operational safety, performance (light gun, airfield audio, 45-day recording, three-second failover), human factors (FAA-G-2100, HF-STD-001), cybersecurity, radio and spectrum (FCC Parts 15 and 87), siting and obstruction marking (Part 77, AC 70/7460-1) and environment and power.

Approvals elsewhere do not carry over automatically. Saab, for example, published the FAA's Operational Viability Decision for its system at Leesburg Executive Airport, Virginia, separately from its European approvals. Ask a non-US supplier which FAA decisions it holds.

Class D airspace goes with an operating control tower, and the FAA decides on airspace. When a tower closes for the night, its airspace normally reverts and pilots follow non-towered procedures. Check the airspace and hours for any airport in the FAA Chart Supplement.

No. A certified controller still issues every clearance. The system replaces the building and the view out of the window, not the person. General Aviation's software tracks aircraft, checks the runway is clear and flags conflicts; the controller decides.

General Aviation specifies one controller per airport. In Europe, centres serve several airports: Saab says RTC Stockholm was planned to serve four airports, and DFS controls Saarbrücken and Erfurt-Weimar from Leipzig. Staffing levels and hours are set with the FAA and the tower operator, so ask for a staffing plan for your traffic.

It changes where controllers can work. Because the station does not have to be on the airfield, a controller can serve an airport that could never recruit staff locally, and a towered airport can extend its hours without staffing the cab overnight.

Through a panoramic video wall built from fixed cameras on the airfield, with pan-tilt-zoom cameras for close-ups, the role binoculars play in a tower cab. Aircraft are boxed and labelled using ADS-B or radar data, and airfield audio and radios are piped to the station.

It depends on the design, so ask. General Aviation uses a closed point-to-point fiber link with no wireless, a FIPS-encrypted VPN and multi-factor remote access, and designs to two-hour repair and three-second failover. Ask every supplier for its failure modes and what pilots are told when service stops.

Yes. In Sweden, LFV launched remote tower services from its Remote Tower Centre in Sundsvall in 2015 using Saab's system, according to Saab, and in Germany DFS controls Saarbrücken and Erfurt-Weimar airports from its Remote Tower Control Centre in Leipzig. Whether one controller works one airport or more at a time is set by the regulator and the operator.

Most drones are small and carry no ADS-B, so they are hard to see on cameras or on surveillance data alike. Some systems use AI-based detection on the video; ask each supplier what it detects, at what range, and whether it is approved for use in air traffic control.

Under FAA Part 107, flying in controlled airspace, including class D around a tower, needs FAA authorization, for example through LAANC, the FAA's Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability. A tower changes the airspace around an airport, so check the FAA's drone pages (faa.gov/uas) for the rules that apply.

It gives a non-towered airport something it lacks: a controller with a live picture of the field and the traffic. That is the basis for managing any mix of aircraft. How drones are folded in, through authorizations, procedures and detection, is still being worked out by the FAA and industry, so treat specific promises with care.