Functional hazard analysis of virtual control towers

Abstract Current legacy procedures for Aerodrome Control significantly rely on the tower controllers’ direct view on the aircraft resp. the airport. Visual information is known as being of high quality and reliable as long as appropriate weather conditions are given. Though, convective weather conditions heavily impact these procedures often leading to an aerodrome capacity backlog. To gain independency from such weather impacts, providing a synthetic view and substituting the “out-of-the window” vision is currently investigated by TU Dresden. Beside the research team 1 within the project Virtual Control Tower Research Study (VICTOR), the investigations concentrate on the safety assessment of such a technically and procedurally adopted environment. Already existing synthetic vision systems seem to have potential to offer a virtual reality that resolves equally the environment and enhances controller capabilities by various new functions. However, a proof of equivalent safety for such a system design for virtual control towers is crucial for operational implementation and hard to achieve. Such as the Functional Hazard Analysis (according to Eurocontrol Safety Assessment Methodology) was performed as a starting point for such an assessment in order to identify hazards, determine severities of effected consequences and safety objectives of a dedicated virtual tower concept. This paper reports results concerning the identification of hazards and risks when using substituted visual information diversity for aerodrome control procedures. Furthermore, concepts for system design and evaluation are presented.