We’ve run a lot of stories over the years about the remote tower experiments at Leesburg Executive Airport (KJYO) in Virginia and Northern Colorado Regional Airport (KFNL) in Loveland, Colorado. Why didn’t they work when similar projects have met with great success in Europe?
In the latest issue of Avionics News, Rob Mark does an impressive job of digging into what really happened with the project at KJYO in his article “How FAA Let Remote Tower Technology Slip Through Its Fingers.”
It’s a fascinating look “behind the curtain” at decision-making at the FAA, as well as at SAAB, the company that was providing the remote tower services at KJYO.
Rob points to several reasons the project failed, with the biggest one being the FAA “essentially moved the goal posts” for the SAAB engineers.
It’s an interesting read and well worth the time. You can see Rob’s full article here or at Rob’s site JetWhine.com.
New managers in the FAA are completely ignorant or very smart. However, they get rid of the intelligent ones or they quit!! What the crap does a postal Manager know about aircraft!! New is NOT ALWAYS BETTER!
Another aviation opportunity that got away. I think the real reason this failed is the same reason most other things fail in the FAA, even those that Congress required like BasicMed. (That one was easy right?, nope)
The FAA is huge, bureaucratic organization. Even if it was a for-profit company it would be slow to change, it is just big. Being a government entity makes it worse.
To get things done in the FAA requires at least one high ranking person to champion each idea or project. More is better. As time goes by they leave or are reassigned or loose interest. Because they are so blasted slow, the likelihood of the champion moving on is high.
The best solution is to speed things up, then the idea or project can succeed or fail on it’s on merits. I don’t claim to know if remote towers are the right idea or not, but the FAA leadership let them fade away as one or more champions of the idea moved on or retired.
What are their big time projects now? UAVs, space launchs, ADS-B for ATC, environmental (but not really 100LL) and getting all the words switched to be gender neutral.
Perplexing indeed. An agency who’s mission seems to be – We are for inefficiency and second guessing especially if it keeps us employed doing whatever it is we do.
Thank you so much for the kind words Janice. This is another one of those perplexing topics with the FAA I’m planning to write to Mr. Whitaker about. Happy holidays to you all your staff.
Nice job on the article, Rob. Good research. The skeptic in me wonders what influence the architects and contractors set to build all those new conventional control towers might have had on the FAA’s decision…. And NATCA, although, as you noted, the staffing levels don’t really change whether the tower is on site or virtual.
Tom;
Good points, but this time around, NATCA was actually a huge supporter of the project. Once the vendors stopped talking about consolidating towers, and pushed the prospect of more towers at smaller airports, the union was solidly behind it.
Dennis