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Western Sydney's new international airport will be the first in Australia to operate without a traditional manned air traffic control tower.
Instead, there will be a 45-metre mast fitted with 20 high definition cameras beaming live feeds back to a data centre.
"Traditional control tower, you look out the window to view the aerodrome. In a digital tower they will have cameras on a mast that will reproduce the image onto a screen," Nicole Lewis, digital expert at Air Services Australia, told 9News.
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At the data centre, 17 kilometres from the airport in the suburb of Eastern Creek, artificial intelligence will overlay information over the live feeds.
"We'll have the speed of the aircraft, the altitude of the aircraft, the callsign of the aircraft," Lewis said.
The cameras will have infrared technology that helps with visibility in low light and bad weather, and will be able to detect items on the runway.
However, changing the century-old system of having a manned tower near the tarmac has raised questions about safety.
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"Absolutely it's safe, at the heart of everything we do with air services it's safety first," Lewis said.
In the highly unlikely event something goes wrong, like a cyberattack or power outage, approach controllers based at Sydney Airport will take over.
"There'll never be a situation where we'll effectively lose an aircraft," Lewis said.
If the mast is struck by lightning, the cameras, which are powered individually, can be used to stitch together a full image if one is damaged.
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The digital tower technology was pioneered by Per Ahl and is already in use at London City Airport, where planes are guided by air traffic controllers based 115 kilometres away.
"What we have done is actually to replace the eyes on the air traffic controller in the tower instead of looking through the window, we have captured that outside image with cameras," Ahl, from SAAB Digital Air Traffic Solutions, told 9News.
The data centre at Eastern Creek will be built by mid-2025, ready for the airport's opening in December 2026.
