World ATM Congress 2022

The World ATM Congress in Madrid is the largest event in the field of air navigation and air traffic control. From June 21st to 23rd in Madrid, it combines a major exhibition with a conference. Almost ten thousand specialist visitors from all over the world use this annual opportunity to familiarise themselves with the latest trends and developments in this field. DLR will be there with several research exhibits: at booth no. 351.

The DLR Institute of Flight Guidance together with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) will exhibit current research projects for the air traffic control of the future. DLR will showcase three exhibits this year:

Remote Tower meets Virtual Reality

ANSPs and airports benefit from synergies provided by remote air traffic services, but many airports with very low revenues are nevertheless unable to afford state-of-the-art remote-tower technology. These predominantly smaller airports often do not provide a full air traffic control service but instead offer lower levels, such as aerodrome flight information service, or just a universal communication station. An off-the-shelf pan-tilt-zoom camera supplemented with a basic video panorama, whose video streams are presented by a virtual reality headset, would be perfectly suitable for those basic service levels and, most importantly: affordable for low-revenue airports. DLR prototyped and tested such a “very low-cost” remote-tower concept and will present first results.

Speech Recognition meets Air Traffic Control

Today the most advanced digital assistants in air traffic control (ATC) already have access to a large number of sensors that allow monitoring of traffic in the air and on the ground. Voice communication between air traffic controller and pilot, however, as one of the most central sources of information in ATC, is not considered by these assistants. Whenever the information from voice communication has to be digitized, controllers are burdened to enter the information manually. Research results show that up to one third of the working time of controllers is spent on these manual inputs. Assistant Based Speech Recognition (ABSR) can close the gap of digitizing ATC voice communication. A live demonstration on the capabilities of ABSR on recognizing and understanding speech from pilots, air traffic and apron controllers within different applications can be seen at the AT-One booth.

Plate Lines – Mitigating Wake-Turbulence Risk

When an aircraft is in flight, counter-rotating regions of turbulence, known as wake vortices, are formed behind it. Wake vortices pose a potential threat to following air traffic. By deploying patented plate lines situated in front of the runway, the lifetime of wake vortices in ground proximity can be reduced by about 30%. The resulting safety benefits for final approaches may, in a next step, even allow reducing aircraft separations. How this can be achieved is on display at the AT-One booth – from the theory behind the plate-line principle elucidated by a hands-on experiment through to the demonstration campaign conducted at Vienna Airport.