Behind me is London City Airport, built on an old dock in East London.
They're building a new control tower here, to replace the 30-year-old one
and to make room for expansion.
But that new tower won't have any people in it.
It'll just be a tall mast with a lot of cameras.
The people will be 80 miles away.
- We're in at the London City ops room, which will go live in January 2020.
And this is where London City air traffic control will be provided from.
London City does not have a lot of space.
So the footprint that's taken up by this mast
is significantly less than it would be for the traditional tower.
The digital tower can be cheaper. It's significantly easier to build.
You don't have to have any of the functionality that you need for people to be in there.
So, there are no restrooms, kitchens, toilets.
Using the augmentation on the screen, we can actually show them the aircraft
as they're flying by the window, with their radar tags on it.
So they can see the callsign, the speed, and altitude.
We also have the pan-tilt-zoom cameras.
In theory you can look into the sun to track an aircraft
who's travelling to the south.
You'd never do that with binoculars, but this system lets you do that.
This is a 360 panorama, but it's compressed into 225 degrees.
The benefit for the controller is that they no longer need
to look over their shoulder to see anything that's passing behind.
You know aircrafts 13 miles, 15 miles on approach, they can see the lights.
So the visibility this gives you is much better than the human eye.
The data is compressed at site
and then it's squirted down a couple of really big pipes down to Swanwick.
We specify that lag as being less than one second,
which is the same lag that we have for voice communications with pilots.
- Right now, that new control room is just used for training.
The camera mast isn't built yet so they're just using footage filmed
from a crane a few months ago.
Digital control towers are already used at smaller airports.
But this will be the first one in a major city
with this level of air traffic.
Something like this just doesn't have to fail safe,
it has to add no additional risk.
- Every controller is quite conservative by nature.
So they have a little what-if in the back of their head.
What if a screen fails, what if a feed fails,
what if a camera fails?
All these things we've put into the design.
On top of each of the screens is a little "stay-alive indicator",
so if it's a quiet time of the day
and there might not be any traffic moving about,
you know that you're still looking at the airport,
you know you're not looking at a frozen picture of the airport.
If you lose a screen, the system is clever enough
to recognise that the screen has failed,
it will then transmit that image onto a spare screen,
reshuffle all the images to actually give the controller the appropriate view,
and then engineers can arrive and change given five or ten minutes.
If a camera fails, we have got the pan-tilt-zoom cameras on the top of the housing
which can actually replicate the view of the camera that's failed.
If it rains, there's compressed air that automatically blows the rain away.
There's bird protection on top, and you've also got some heaters inside
so it doesn't get misty or frosty in the winter.
If the cameras, in their entirety, fail,
we effectively manage the transition as if it was fog.
We still have a number of backup routes.
We have separate voice communications to the airport which are unaffected.
Controllers can't see in fog, you lose the cameras, you can't see
and we just slowly manage that transition to the same type of operation.
We are using separate data feeds.
They come from the masts, one goes east, one goes west.
They're not public internet, they don't go into the cloud.
They don't go through the same ducts.
They are robust and secure.
- Now, I don't want this to sound like a sponsored video.
It isn't.
But having visited the new control centre,
yeah, in the rational part of my brain,
I'm convinced that it works and it's safe.
Given the augmented reality overlays and the extra height,
it might well be more safe than the old tower.
But, it still feels a bit wrong, and I don't have a sensible reason why.
There are plenty of times that "it just feels wrong"
can be a good reason to avoid something.
Bad relationships, walking down a dark street at night;
your brain is good at avoiding things that might hurt you.
But air travel, something so far outside everyday experience
where safety is so important,
that can't be governed by whether something feels right.
Here, the evidence is pretty solid.
And if I'm on a flight out of here in 2020,
I'll give the cameras a wave as I take off.
Tell me we got that!