The honest ledger: Leesburg, Northern Colorado, and Scotland's HIAL all ended without an operational remote tower.
Not every remote tower program lands, and the failures teach as much as the wins. In the US, the Leesburg Executive (JYO) pilot ran from about 2015 with provisional FAA approval, but Saab withdrew from certification in February 2023 over the FAA's 2021 System Design Approval criteria, and the FAA ended the program and its ATC services on June 14, 2023, after roughly eight years of pilot operations. At Northern Colorado Regional (FNL), Searidge terminated its work in October 2023; Colorado explored salvaging the effort with RTX and Frequentis while the airport proceeded with a conventional tower. In Scotland, Highlands and Islands Airports pulled its remote tower tender in January 2022 and scrapped the wider air traffic modernisation programme in 2022 after union and community opposition, with roughly GBP 10.5M spent. The common threads: certification paths vendors could not close in the US, and stakeholder resistance in Scotland, problems the operational deployments in Europe and the Middle East had to solve.