If you enjoy reading about my former career, ATC, then you may enjoy reading about the latest breakthrough with virtual towers. NATS had already begun working on this when I left 5 years ago, which shows how much work has gone into it.
In this post:
Air Traffic Control Goes Virtual At One Of London’s Major Airports
Passengers are used to seeing the Air Traffic Control tower soaring above the airfield as they take off on their flights from most airports. What they may not realize this summer is that at one major London Airport, the controllers are no longer there.
Spain to open 20th with no testing?
As we are now learning from the Portugal saga (still no word three days before they promised to open up for UK tourists), I’d take all of this with a pinch of salt! According to the English version of Spanish newspaper “El Pais”,
The Spanish minister tourism said that British tourists would be allowed to visit Spain from 20 May onwards, provided that the UK puts Spain on the “green list” of countries.
She said, “We know what we have to do to allow British people to travel to Spain, which is to lower the cumulative incidence and keep on vaccinating.”
Currently, you can’t travel to Spain from the UK except for exceptional reasons, and you must present a negative PCR test on arrival in the country. Spain is on the amber list and not expected to make the green list for a least another 6 weeks.
She added that travellers from the UK were likely to be excluded from providing a negative PCR test on arrival given the low level of Covid in the UK.
Greece aims to fully vaccinate its 6,000 islands by the end June
Greek had previously said it would be prioritising the smaller islands for vaccines. Now they have confirmed that they will concentrate on all 6,000 islands for vaccination. This is partly due to tourism. The Greek Tourism Minister told Telegraph “The vaccination programme is moving along swiftly and the islands have been prioritised. The small islands are finished already, the medium ones will be in the next few days; all will be fully vaccinated by the end of June.”
Many were surprised that some of the islands did not make the green list given their low levels of Covid and the lack of FCDO warning against Rhodes, Kos, Zakynthos, Corfu and Crete. It has been predicted that these could make the next green list, but quite frankly, who knows? The hope is for the Greek government that the high vaccination rate would lead to an almost guaranteed green status for the country by the peak holiday season.
3 comments
Fascinating, but what happens when the WiFi goes down?
It’s just the same as for radar which the area controllers use. In my 23 years in ATC I can only recall one brief radar failure many years ago. Systems are not run on normal WiFi and have many many layers of redundancy and back up.
Interesting article about the ATC. My initial skepticism about the cost savings versus implementation costs was quickly overtaken by thoughts of people working from home, operating Minority Report style virtual desktops and wearing VR/AR headsets…
The workforce will obviously be decimated and even the home workers eventually replaced by autonomous AI apps, but what a glorious future there will be for our descendants, in a Star Trek stylee… God help the raft of unemployed in the interim, though, until money is made redundant and support provided for all.
I think…
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