Active supervision in a Remote Tower Center: Rethinking of a new position in the ATC Domain.

Abstract

A valuable resource in the ATC Domain are the women and men that work as Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCO) and fully devote their capacities into safe and efficient traffic. Remote Tower Operations in general are a solution for airports with a low amount of traffic to efficiently distribute their resources. The concept is based on single Remote Tower Operation, which is the control of one airport from a distant location, and extended with the Multiple Remote Tower Operations (MRTO). MRTO is the control of up to three airports at a time from one workspace. These concepts enable the air navigation service (ANS) providers to rethink their existing workplaces and role assignments and open up new working positions in the ATC domain. Weber (2019) presents the first German remote tower operation of Saarbrücken airport from Leipzig center. Saarbrücken is 450 km away from Leipzig, but RTO allows a safe and efficient monitoring of the airport. With single remote tower operations proven to be operational, further research focuses on the Multiple Remote Tower Operations. The first part of the concept is the provision of air traffic service by one ATCO to multiple single remote tower operations at the same time. This is connected to new challenges which derive from such an innovative work and role definition, e.g. maintaining situational awareness or different workload. These additional challenges in the existing workplace could partially be mitigated by an existing supervisor position. In addition to this, the second part of the concept defines a new role, the remote center supervisor. The remote center supervisor supports the ATCOs working under MRTO. As (Friedrich et al., 2021) stated this position and workplace are not yet defined. The focus of this paper is the analysis of the use cases validated in the first operational MRT environment.