Augmented and virtual reality in the airport control tower

As a matter of fact, airports are considered as the bottleneck to increasing the capacity of the overall Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. While augmenting throughput in high performing airport operations, attention has rightly been placed on doing it in a safe manner. Many of the advances in airport operational safety come in the form of visualization tools for tower controllers. The increasing interest in Synthetic Vision (SV) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies has led various analysts to positively esteem the adoption of new tools enabling both pilots and controllers to seamlessly operate under Visual Meteorological Conditions and Instrument Meteorological Conditions. This paper presents the motivations, the objectives, the proposed methodology and the expected impacts of the RETINA (Resilient Synthetic Vision for Advanced Control Tower Air Navigation Service Provision) project that has recently been granted by the SESAR (Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research) Joint Undertaking. The two-years exploratory research project will investigate the potential and applicability of SV tools and Virtual/Augmented Reality (V/AR) display techniques for the Air Traffic Control (ATC) service provision by the airport control tower.