WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Behind me is London City Airport,
built on an old dock in East London.

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They're building a new control tower here,
to replace the 30-year-old one

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and to make room for expansion.

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But that new tower won't
have any people in it.

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It'll just be a tall mast
with a lot of cameras.

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The people will be 80 miles away.

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- We're in at the London City ops room, 
which will go live in January 2020.

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And this is where London City
air traffic control will be provided from.

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London City does not have a lot of space.

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So the footprint that's
taken up by this mast

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is significantly less than it would be
for the traditional tower.

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The digital tower can be cheaper.
It's significantly easier to build.

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You don't have to have any of the functionality
that you need for people to be in there.

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So, there are no restrooms,
kitchens, toilets.

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Using the augmentation on the screen,
we can actually show them the aircraft

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as they're flying by the window,
with their radar tags on it.

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So they can see the callsign,
the speed, and altitude.

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We also have the pan-tilt-zoom cameras.

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In theory you can look into
the sun to track an aircraft

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who's travelling to the south.

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You'd never do that with binoculars,
but this system lets you do that.

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This is a 360 panorama,
but it's compressed into 225 degrees.

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The benefit for the controller is
that they no longer need

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to look over their shoulder to see anything that's passing behind.

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You know aircrafts 13 miles, 15 miles on approach,
they can see the lights.

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So the visibility this gives you
is much better than the human eye.

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The data is compressed at site

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and then it's squirted down a couple of
really big pipes down to Swanwick.

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We specify that lag as being
less than one second,

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which is the same lag that we have
for voice communications with pilots.

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- Right now, that new control room
is just used for training.

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The camera mast isn't built yet
so they're just using footage filmed

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from a crane a few months ago.

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Digital control towers are
already used at smaller airports.

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But this will be the
first one in a major city

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with this level of air traffic.

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Something like this just
doesn't have to fail safe,

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it has to add no additional risk.

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- Every controller is quite
conservative by nature.

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So they have a little what-if
in the back of their head.

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What if a screen fails,
what if a feed fails,

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what if a camera fails?

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All these things we've
put into the design.

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On top of each of the screens is
a little "stay-alive indicator",

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so if it's a quiet time of the day

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and there might not be
any traffic moving about,

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you know that you're still
looking at the airport,

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you know you're not looking at
a frozen picture of the airport.

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If you lose a screen, the
system is clever enough

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to recognise that the screen has failed,

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it will then transmit that
image onto a spare screen,

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reshuffle all the images to actually give
the controller the appropriate view,

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and then engineers can arrive and change
given five or ten minutes.

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If a camera fails, we have got the
pan-tilt-zoom cameras on the top of the housing

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which can actually replicate the view
of the camera that's failed.

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If it rains, there's compressed air
that automatically blows the rain away.

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There's bird protection on top,
and you've also got some heaters inside

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so it doesn't get misty
or frosty in the winter.

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If the cameras, in their entirety, fail,

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we effectively manage the transition
as if it was fog.

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We still have a number of backup routes.

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We have separate voice communications
to the airport which are unaffected.

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Controllers can't see in fog,
you lose the cameras, you can't see

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and we just slowly manage that transition
to the same type of operation.

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We are using separate data feeds.

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They come from the masts,
one goes east, one goes west.

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They're not public internet,
they don't go into the cloud.

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They don't go through the same ducts.

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They are robust and secure.

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- Now, I don't want this to sound
like a sponsored video.

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It isn't.

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But having visited the new control centre,

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yeah, in the rational part of my brain,

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I'm convinced that it works and it's safe.

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Given the augmented reality
overlays and the extra height,

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it might well be more
safe than the old tower.

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But, it still feels a bit wrong,
and I don't have a sensible reason why.

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There are plenty of times
that "it just feels wrong"

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can be a good reason to avoid something.

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Bad relationships, walking
down a dark street at night;

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your brain is good at avoiding
things that might hurt you.

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But air travel, something so
far outside everyday experience

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where safety is so important,

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that can't be governed by
whether something feels right.

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Here, the evidence is pretty solid.

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And if I'm on a flight
out of here in 2020,

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I'll give the cameras
a wave as I take off.

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Tell me we got that!