At smaller airports, the controllers direct traffic and manage the airfield. Currently, pilots using the Beckley-area airport talk among themselves to advise themselves of traffic.
An actual, physical tower would cost between $2 million and $3 million, with an ongoing annual expense of $450,000 for maintenance. A virtual tower would be far less expensive.
Quadrex Aviation LLC, based in Melbourne, Fla. is developing a plan for a computer-driven control tower for Raleigh County Airport Authority. The report will be out in September. “If this does work as advertised, or even better than we imagined, then that holds the promise out to a lot of airports that could never afford to justify a control tower in the first place, and to provide that level of safety in an environment where you’ve got a lot of people trying to occupy the same air space.” according to Dr. David Byers, senior development professional for Quadrex Aviation LLC. And, regarding the Beckley area airport, “It’s kind of like an airport graduating from a two-way stop at an intersection to a four-way stop, and you reach a certain point say, at a four-way stop, and if you’ve ever been in that situation, well, who’s next? You may decide, ‘Well, you’re next,’ and somebody has the same opinion and attitude, and the next thing you know, there’s a conflict there. The concept at Beckley is to explore the opportunity of actually setting up a facility where they can test the technologies, to see ‘here’s what we think it’s going to do,’ and to put it in a facility where it can be managed and monitored to see if it’s doing what it’s advertised to do and get some feedback from the pilots and essentially be a prototype of other systems that could go up around the country.”
