Advanced ground surveillance for remote tower

Small and medium sized airports are normally occupied only a short time a day typically handling less than 10 flights per day. Remote tower allows to save costs by using air traffic controllers from a bigger airport tower or to have one remote tower for a couple of small and medium sized airports. Moving the tower operation of course means that all means of communication, sensor information but also visual information have to be available at the remote tower. Remote communication and sensor information are less of an issue as remote controller positions are used in other areas, e.g. public safety (police, FD, military ...) but the visual information of an air traffic controller is special as the visual experience of the situation on ground is key to the fast and error free understanding of the ATC controller of the situation at hand. Therefore just a simple CCTV solution cannot do the trick. In order to give the operator the "look- and-feel" he is accustomed a "virtual view from the tower" is required. This is accomplished by using several fix mounted cameras close to the remote airstrip providing video streams to several monitors in front of the operator plus additional high resolution Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras for close observation. The Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras can be operated manually by the operator or can automatically follow the incoming plane. Alternatively also thermal and laser cameras can be used as one of the Pan-Tilt- Zoom cameras. This paper describes a remote tower concept including a description and discussion of the technical set-up, the user interface, the transmission aspects and the possible re-use of the system for other remote services based on SOA.