The air traffic control tower of the future has no people—but it does have security concerns

It's such a weird thing to hear, it seems counter-intuitive: London City Airport is building a new air traffic control tower that will be completely digital and manned by a group of human controllers who will be over 100 miles away.

High-definition video will be transmitted to the remote location, providing the human controllers with 360-degree video and live sound so that the controllers will feel like they're still at the airport even though they're far away. 

The big advantage here: the high-definition visuals, provided by over a dozen different "pan-tilt-zoom" cameras, will allow controllers to see things in finer details than they could with the naked eye with a 30X zoom, like spotting rogue drones that pose a danger. Read more...