Exclusive: Sweden to get world's first remote-controlled airport

On a clear day, Per Granquist cannot see forever. But from his perch inside the airport control tower here, he does have an unobstructed view of the future. The big picture is provided from a 33-foot mast where a gray turret holds an array of digital video cameras, communications antennas, sensors and microphones -a setup that resembles a cross between a space-age dovecote and a prison guard tower. 

The system is meant to collect and integrate information of the sort that Granquist, 40, has been providing with his own eyes and ears as an air traffic controller for the last 17 years at this airport in Sweden. The information from this array, though, is being sent elsewhere -beamed by fibre-optic cable to a windowless room of another airport, 161km south, in Sundsvall.


The system is still in test mode, but the rest of the global commercial aviation industry is watching closely.Early next year, Granquist and his colleagues expect to move to Sundsvall. And from there, they will begin “virtually“ guiding the half-dozen or so daily flights in and out of Ornskoldsvik.

Ornskoldsvik is about to become the world's first remotely controlled airport.

“At first it seemed a bit weird,“ Granquist said of his training on the new system.

In Sundsvall, instead of surveying the airport through plate-glass windows, he will sit before a semicircular wall of more than a dozen 55inch liquid-crystal displays.Carved from an Arctic pine forest along Sweden's fjordstudded eastern coast, Ornskoldsvik might seem an unlikely setting for a potential aviation revolution.

But over the last several years, officials from dozens of countries have made their way down the airport's road and past the yellow moosecrossing signs to get a firsthand look at technology that many expect will eventually transform the way air traffic is managed worldwide.

It is a concept that experts say has uses not only for the world's out-of-the way places but could also enhance efficiency and safety at sprawling urban airports where increasing air traffic places ever greater demands on hu man controllers. “I have little doubt that this is the next big thing for our industry,“ said Paul Jones, operations manager at NATS, which provides air navigation services at Heathrow and other British airports. He is among those who have seen the Swedish setup firsthand. “I do think one day it could replace traditional visual control towers almost completely ,“ Jones said.

It is no accident that the idea for a remote-controlled airport emerged from Sweden, whose northern regions are thinly populated and poorly served by rail or other transportation alternatives.

While many of the world's remote communities are so tiny as to rely on small private planes whose pilots coordinate their own take-offs and landings by radio, towns like Ornskoldsvik -population 55,000 -are just big enough to justify minimal scheduled airline services and a control tower.

Yet with just a handful of take-offs and landings most days, air traffic controllers at such airports often spend more of their time monitoring the weather or filling out paperwork than actually guiding planes. “It doesn't really make economic or even social sense to station a fully qualified air traffic controller in some of these places,“ said Erik Backman, director of operations at LFV , Sweden's state-owned air navigation service provider.