This has been made possible with a remote tower which has a facility to transmit pictures from airport via fibre optics and video transmission.
"In a remote tower, there are around 14 cameras which provide high resolution and higher angles of vision of an approaching and departing aircraft to an ATC official sitting at a place, which could be not at the airport but in the city.
"He monitors the pictures on a U-shaped screen and helps planes land and take off at different airports," says Michael Sahlberg, Marketing Director of the Swedish firm SAAB.
The company is installing the first operational site in Sundsvall and Ornskoldsvik for Air Traffic Control purposes in Sweden and then a remote tower would be installed in Varyo for a heliport.
Norway currently has an AFIS (aerodrome flight information service) but would expand to ATC eventually.
Elaborating more about the tower, he said for an efficient one, bandwidth requirement was limited. For a tower centre and an airport, 10 megabits is required which would go down to 2 megabits in the future as technology improves.
Terming it a revolutionary initiative, Sahlberg says setting up of remote towers can help India overcome the shortage of qualified manpower and help in better utilisation of manpower.
A person can control one airport in the morning and move to another in the afternoon without shifting office.
It would be ideal for those airports which are near to each other and have less number of flights at different points of time in a day like Jaipur, Udaipur, Jodhpur and other places, he says.
A person can help land a plane at Jaipur, help another one take off from Udaipur and then move back to Jaipur or any other airport after that.
This would not only reduce cost on manpower but also make the operations safe as the tower has all safety-enhancing technologies, like runway incursion monitoring and low visibility operating procedures to support an ATCO.
Also the maintenance costs are reduced and personnel allocation can be optimised and for an ATCO the tower provides a flexible and simulating working environment, the official says.
According to SAAB, the technology is not expensive as a remote tower is portable and easily expandable.
