Digital Towers

About and method

Digital Towers is an independent reference to remote and digital air traffic control towers. It is built only from public sources. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for the FAA or any other government body, and it is not for operational use.

How entries are made

  • Every fact on a tower page carries the URL of the public page it came from.
  • Status: operational, trial, planned, decommissioned, cancelled or unverified. Unverified means the last source we found is old and no go-live notice turned up.
  • Confidence: high when an operator, regulator or the airport states the fact; medium when a vendor or trade press does; low when the evidence is old, secondary or single-sourced.
  • Hybrid and contingency facilities are listed with their own type and are not counted as remote towers in the headline claim.
  • Coordinates come from OurAirports (public domain) by ICAO code. Centres without a code are placed approximately and marked.

News

A scheduled job reads public feeds (Google News search, Federal Register API, CANSO, NATS, AVweb, Aviation Tech Today, Airport Improvement), keeps only items that match remote or digital tower terms, removes duplicates, tags them, and puts new ones in a review queue. They publish after 24 hours unless flagged. The FAA newsroom feed blocks automated readers, and the Congress.gov API needs a free key, so neither is wired yet.

Corrections

Use "Suggest a correction" on any tower page, which opens an issue on GitHub with a public source link.

Reuse

The dataset is free to reuse with attribution to digitaltowers.org: downloads. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), tiles by Protomaps, rendered with MapLibre GL.

Photo credits