The local airport near me has had an experimental remote tower system since 2018. Prior to this there was no tower which limited the types of aircraft which could use the airport and the services which could operate out of it. They were informed in February that SAAB, the provider of the remote tower service, and the FAA were unable to reach an agreement regarding final certification of the system. SAAB has withdrawn their application for final certification. The remote tower system must be shut down June 30th. I believe the air traffic controllers are located in the Kansas City area and the facility there will remain open because the system is certified and in use some places outside the US.
The FAA is going to provide a mobile tower through September after which the town, which owns the airport, must enter a lease for the tower including manning it with controllers at a cost of $720k per year. The town is currently investigating how to fund the mobile tower and a permanent replacement tower. They are seeking grants and/or considering instituting landing fees. The permanent tower must be completed and certified within 5 years.
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.
There are a lot of things in the aviation world that seem weird to those who work in an environment where everything gets thrown away and rewritten every couple of years.
Aviation infrastructure moves veeeeeerrrrry slowly. Heck, there are still DC-3s in commercial service (not just airshows or the like, but actual commercial service) and that plane is nearly 90 years old.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were still small airports who get these notices on a printing teletype or something of that nature.
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.
Having TRACON work with three towers instead of two doesn't sound any more difficult. I thought that the towers mostly just took already-sequenced traffic from TRACON and landed them, and handed departing traffic off to TRACON once they left the runway. As for fewer sets of runways, that sounds harder to me, not easier, since you have more traffic coming into the airport and that traffic has to be sequenced and deconflicted with all the other traffic coming into that particular airport.
I could be wrong on this, my interactions with ATC are limited to occasionally listening to DCA tower while watching the planes land, and every so often being the point of contact to call the local TRACON to notify them of our glider operations.
Just an FYI, but if it’s at an airfield, the FAA can come after you if you don’t also use it for some kind of aviation. I forget the exact wording, but it’s basically to help protect hangar prices for people who fly.
Do you have a link where I can learn more about that?
Some quick googling turns up nothing more than the state Department of Aviation, which looks serve the same purpose as other states' departments of aviation. Namely, to maintain state-owned airfields and support some planning functions.
https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/non_federal/r...
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