You may have an inflated sense of what a tower is for, and whether Europeans are better at it than Americans or v.v.
Air traffic control (at least in the US) has the purpose of ensuring separation of air traffic. That is, to help ensure that aircraft do not hit each other, by coordinating when there could be conflicts. They do not primarily exist for (or were not at least created for the purpose of) helping aircraft fundamentally navigate and or avoid non-aircraft obstacles. Or controlling an aircraft's every permissible action in the air.
So, if an airfield has little traffic, in general or such as in off-hours, there may be no tower, or the tower may be unmanned. Aircraft then are responsible for coordinating themselves by announcing their activities, and taking the observation of the airport conditions into their own responsibility.
It may be you believe that because European airspace is a bit denser, and in general the airports with scheduled commercial service are busier because of the density. But as others noted, there are uncontrolled/untowered airports just as in the US.
Kinda: the round-island road goes between the airport terminal and the runway, meaning traffic needs to be stopped whenever planes are taxiing to/from the runway. You can see it here:
I find it amazing that scheduled flights with an A320 would happen at an airport without control tower. I don't think this happens in Europe, I trained at a tiny airport that only had some small 40pax regional turbojets and the local tower and CTR (only 10 miles!) was always in operation when they were active.
There are uncontrolled airports here yes but I haven't seen any with airline traffic that were uncontrolled during the time of airline operation.
In fact even when a private jet would come in after hours the tower would be active. It was really for all kinds of commercial activity.
I'm not saying that Europe is better at this than the US but I do think it makes sense to have someone watching especially to ensure separation of traffic as you say. Especially with something as big as an A320.
In this case especially a tower assigning an active runway would have prevented the Beechcraft approaching from the opposite direction.
I have to say also that GA is not as big as in the US and that makes GA pilots in general less vigilant and experienced with proximity to airline traffic so that's another factor.
The vast majority of airports are non-towered. The playa is about as perfect a surface to land on as you can imagine. The main difficulty is figuring out how far you are above the ground, but if you set up a proper approach, it doesn't really matter.
For reference, the overwhelming majority of airports don't use air traffic controllers ("non-towered"). That's because they are way too small and service too few aircraft.
For those airports, the procedure is to dial the unicom frequency that the sectional chart gives for the airport and tell everyone what you're doing.
It's unclear what exactly this control tower actually does for pilots flying into the airport. It's supposed to centralize ATC so they can remotely control air traffic? From the project site, it seems like it's just the cameras and monitoring. No communication otherwise.
Yeowch. I was about ready to make a comment about how the airport/approach plates should make something like this impossible, but then I looked up the diagram for SEA:
Basically, you've got a runway, the taxiway of the same length as the runway!, and then two longer runways from left to right. I totally see how someone could make this mistake in bad lighting or weather!
The island of Røst, off to the north west of Norway, has about 500 inhabitants, a subsea cable, and a remote controlled airport. I don't know if the cable is a hard requirement, but I imagine it is helpful to ensure stable airport operations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STqmbc8k9rU
reply