Name: The Tech Making Airport Towers Obsolete | WSJ Booked
Uploaded: 2024-02-28T08:30:49.000Z
Duration: 6 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Narrator] The tower at London's Heathrow Airport

While air traffic controllers at the top of the tower

- [Traffic Controller] 658, 27 right, cleared for takeoff,

lies the next generation of air traffic control,

Here, companies are testing whether high-definition cameras

and AI algorithms could bring air traffic control

That's because while air traffic has increased fivefold

So while towers have become an iconic part of any airport,

Here's how digital towers are reshaping airports.

it's a live feed from an array of high-definition cameras

mounted here, just below Heathrow's tower,

to create a panoramic view of the runways.

that the controllers see out of the window,

are seeing out of the window as we speak now.

- [Narrator] The system is being run by NATS,

a company that provides air traffic management services

Andy said that as well as showing the view from the tower,

an algorithm is overlaying radar information

They can be distributed anywhere around the airfield,

providing views at ground level during low clouds,

or even allowing the air traffic controller

two or three kilometers along the surface of the airport,

instantly see objects that are hidden by a terminal building

as if they were right beneath the air traffic control tower.

- [Narrator] Once you have cameras everywhere,

the video can also be sent to machine learning algorithms,

by Canadian Airport Technology firm, Searidge.

Here, an AI model is using visual processing

to identify the support vehicles around the aircraft,

for the plane to make its next departure,

something that's currently estimated by ground staff.

After all, planes that aren't flying don't make money.

A Boeing study found that if you take 25 minutes

to turn around a 500 mile flight, instead of 35 minutes,

you could squeeze in almost 200 extra flights in a year.

of identifying when an airplane has safely left the runway,

allowing aircraft to continue to take off and land

- An AI will happily monitor a wide range

So going from a human scan around an airport

to AI being kind of omnipresent in terms of its monitoring,

because you then provide the controller with more headspace

If you've ever landed at London City Airport in the UK,

that this traditional control tower-looking building

was where the air traffic controllers sit.

But there're actually in a digital tower over 70 miles away

is being used to provide remote air traffic services

and is set to expand to 21 by the end of the decade,

at up to three airports from the same workstation.

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The Tech Making Airport Towers Obsolete | WSJ Booked

assume

iconic

identify

capable