Remote Tower Research in the United States

The United States (U.S.) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been conducting remote tower research since 2006. The focus of this effort has changed multiple times since the inception of the research. As a result, a number of different remote tower concepts were developed and validated to varying degrees. These included the Staffed NextGen Tower concept for all sized airports, the Select Services Concept for non-towered airports, and the Full Services Concept for non-towered airports. In 2013, the direction of the research changed again, and the FAA began to work on a Colorado initiative that envisions the use of their Wide Area Multilateration (WAM) for improving services at the non-towered ski airports in Colorado. Currently, the FAA is also initiating the evaluation of the camera-based concept at Leesburg, Virginia. All these efforts are described in the following sections.