ORNSKOLDSVIK (SWEDEN ) : 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 Mr. Granquist, 40, has been providing with his own eyes and ears as an air traffic controller for the last 17 years at this small airport in northern Sweden.
The information from this array, though, is being sent elsewhere — beamed by fiber-optic cable to a windowless room of another airport, 100 miles south, in the slightly larger town of Sundsvall.
The system is still in test mode, but the rest of the global commercial aviation industry is watching closely. Early next year, Mr. Granquist and a handful of 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," Mr. 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 55-inch liquid-crystal displays.
"But after two weeks," Mr. Granquist added, "it really feels no different from sitting here."
Carved from an Arctic pine forest along Sweden's fjord-studded 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 rutted gravel road and past the yellow moose-crossing 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 human 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 a dozen 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," Mr. 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. Much like Alaska and vast swaths of northern Canada, Scandinavia is dotted with dozens of small airports that provide vital connections to the outside world.
While many of the world's remote communities are so tiny as to rely on small private planes whose pilots coordinate their own takeoffs 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 takeoffs 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.
Full-time controllers in Sweden average about $77,000 a year in pay, he said, a cost that rises to more than $140,000, once social security and other employee charges are included. There are also expenses for maintaining a building for use by human controllers. For the 28 civilian and military airports that LFV serves — several of them, like Ornskoldsvik, lose money — air traffic control represents a large part of their operating costs.
That is why LFV began exploring the idea of pooling controllers at a single location, to guide flights remotely. In 2006, the agency invited the Swedish aeronautics and technology group Saab to develop a prototype that could be operated with minimal additional training by licensed controllers as well as meet international safety requirements. The system Saab developed was installed at both Ornskoldsvik and Sundsvall airports in 2012 and it was expected to receive certification from Swedish regulators by the end of this week.
To guard against a remote-control airport's being hijacked by hackers, the data transmitted between the camera tower and the remote control center is scrambled using dedicated hardware and encryption software, said Anders Carp, a Saab vice president in charge of traffic management systems. As an added layer of security, he said, Saab also uses an algorithm to verify that images have not been tampered with en route.
Mikael Henriksson has been at the fore of LFV's push into the future. An air traffic controller for 40 years, Mr. Henriksson, 59, has worked at dozens of civilian and military airports in Sweden and abroad, including a few harrowing stints in the war zones of Iraq. His job now is helping controllers like Mr. Granquist make the leap to remote tower technology, which unlike transitioning from being an airplane pilot to a drone operator, largely relies on an identical set of skills.
"Controllers are already spending most of their time looking at a screen instead of out a window," Mr. Henriksson said.
On a recent day at the remote control center in Sundsvall, Mr. Henriksson put the cameras in Ornskoldsvik through their paces. With the tap of a stylus on a sleek glass panel, the arc of display panels flickered to life, presenting a crisp 360-degree panorama of the Ornskoldsvik runway.
As passengers boarded a Stockholm-bound turboprop on the tarmac, a flock of blackbirds flitted over the projected airfield, then disappeared into the trees, which swayed in the gentle breeze. A truck rolling slowly past a hangar was automatically highlighted by a red rectangle that followed its movement across the screens. Mr. Henriksson clicked to activate one of two robotic zoom cameras, opening a new window that functioned as virtual binoculars.
When the plane took off, a few minutes later, the hum of its engines passed from right to left through the room's speakers, in perfect surround sound.
Mr. Carp, of Saab, explained that the system could be equipped with optional enhancements like infrared or night-vision lenses and 3-D-augmented reality overlays. Such features could come in particularly handy in places like Scandinavia, where frequent snowstorms and long winter nights are particularly challenging to air controllers. A built-in recording function allows airports to store and replay video and data for training purposes — or to aid investigators in the event of an accident.
Officials at larger airports are also intrigued by the possibility of using remote camera technology to complement traditional control towers — either to give human controllers a clearer view of parts of the airport that might be obstructed by other buildings, or to serve as a contingency in the event of extreme weather, a disaster or even a terrorist attack.
A few major international airports already have emergency backup centers where a team of controllers can direct a reduced number of flights remotely, relying on radar and radio communications. Heathrow, for example, set up such a site in 2009, in a building near the airport that Mr. Jones of NATS said had never been deployed but was capable of operating at 80 percent capacity in the event the airport's main control towers were disabled by a fire or a power failure.
"But it doesn't have windows," Mr. Jones said of the Heathrow site. Installing a remote-tower system with cameras and video screens, he said, would — virtually, at least - "put the windows back in" and enable the airport, Europe's busiest, to operate at close to full capacity in an emergency.
Back in Ornskoldsvik, Mr. Granquist most days now works his nine-hour shift in solitude, with only an occasional visit from Robert Gyllroth, the airport manager, who sometimes asks him to pitch in with other airport tasks, like manning the tiny duty-free shop.
Three years ago, when he first learned of the plan to operate Ornskoldsvik's tower remotely, Mr. Granquist was upset at the prospect of having to move his family to Sundsvall. But his reluctance has since turned to impatience — and excitement at the career possibilities that remote technology might open for him at other, larger airports.
"It will also be nice," Mr. Granquist said as he padded in stocking feet to adjust a window blind against the setting sun, "to have some colleagues."
