OREANDA-NEWS. March 15, 2016. At the World ATM Congress 2016, Thales unveils its remote tower offering, an extension of TopSky-ATC, its market-leading automation system.

Thales’s remote tower offering provides increased situational awareness through a combination of sensors and cameras, enabling remote air traffic management at a reduced cost, without an impact to safety or availability.

The offering is specifically designed for the provision of services to locations that were not previously economically viable, such as low volume airports, long periods of low traffic levels such as nighttime operations or airports with high seasonality impact. It can also be deployed for dangerous or unpopular sites like active military theatres. The offering is also perfectly suited as a business continuity and disaster contingency support in case the primary tower suffers a catastrophic failure, and where the ability to support increased operations while maintaining existing staff levels is desirable.
 
TopSky-ATC which the offering extends from, is the most widely-deployed and flexible ATC automation system in the world with 140 air traffic control centres supporting tower, approach, en route and oceanic services.  Many TopSky-ATC customers already leverage its embedded remote centre capability in order to deploy remote approach control or tower systems because they use the same core processing, data and tools. The capability to support remote tower applications is a natural and easy progression of this system. 

Thales also announces partnership agreements with HungaroControl and Searidge Technologies for near-term opportunities as well as collaborative development of more sophisticated remote tower concepts. Thales brings its portfolio of air traffic management technologies and system integration expertise to this partnership.

HungaroControl, a long-standing Thales customer and innovative air navigation service provider for Hungary, is a forerunner in developing and implementing new value-generating operational concepts. Searidge Technologies is a technology innovator, offering a field-proven video-based technology platform and extensive experience improving visibility on some of the world’s largest airport surfaces.