Ferihegy airport was shut down recently for the better half of a day as the result of a complete failure of the control tower. According to news reports, a heating pipe failed and this resulted in the electric installations being soaked. No electricity, no play.
Many years ago I did work in the control tower of Ferihegy, albeit not in the spanking new one which went belly up this time but in the old one adorning Terminal 1. We did have failures involving our radios (we had a battery powered reserve set) and the control panel of the runway lights (which were subsequently operated from the airport’s central power station)… Once we even had approach control talk to the aircraft normally worked by the tower and we gave approach the clearances to be passed to the pilots via telephone. It was not easy but closing the airport because of a technical glitch like this was not something any supervisor in their right mind would have proposed back then.
But it is now… there must have been an overriding reason for shutting down the field rather than coming up with a nice solution.
Apparently, the folks in Budapest did not really have a well thought out contingency procedure to use in such cases. May be they thought something like this could never happen…
Anyway, Roger-Wilco went around some of the airports in Europe to see what they have up their sleeve in case the roof falls in. We will start with Brussels National and London Heathrow and Gatwick. They are not really comparable with Ferihegy but are nevertheless similar, since they all have new towers with the old facility still intact.
At Brussels, the new control tower has two control rooms, at different levels in the control tower building, with basically the same equipment in each. If the whole tower needs to be evacuated for whatever reason, the old control tower cab, atop the main terminal, is the designated “contingency” tower. This is equipped with more or less the same equipment, tools and interfaces as the new tower. So, any service interruption will not last longer than what is needed to get the controllers from the old tower to the new one. The “Belgocontrol Contingency Plan” contains the details of the Brussels Tower Contingency Plan, all of which is published in the Belgocontrol Contingency Handbook. When things go sour, everyone takes the Handbook and follows the detailed guidance contained therein to perform their individual, pre-assigned duties.
At London Heathrow, there is a virtual tower, offsite, that can deliver roughly 75 % of the throughput of the main tower and it can be activated within minutes. Heathrow Airport’s Virtual Control Facility (VCF) is the first of its kind in the world. A fully-approved virtual control room, it enables Heathrow to have its air traffic controlled remotely. The VCF looks and feels like the inside of a Control Tower, but it’s off the airport, at ground level, with no windows. Controllers work as if the airport were fog-bound – using radar screens, surveillance technology and radio communication to keep the airport functioning. The location of the facility is kept confidential.
At London Gatwick, the old tower is the fall back facility and this too can be activated in a very short time.
We will continue with this overview as new information comes in. However, if you would like to contribute with information about the contingency arrangements at your airport, click here or just leave a comment after this article!