Two small airports now run air traffic from camera feeds, and five more are next

At Bartow Executive Airport in Florida, the people guiding aircraft sit in a ground-level building roughly 600 feet from the camera array that does the looking. On Nov. 6 the Federal Aviation Administration announced that Bartow and Kenai Municipal Airport in Alaska are the first two airports with operational digital air traffic control towers, and that five more are lined up behind them.

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Controllers still manage the airspace at both fields. What changed is the window: a wall of video screens fed by high-definition cameras replaces the glass cab, and it gives controllers a continuous 360-degree picture of runways, taxiways and the sky around them.

Bartow and Kenai, the first two

The FAA’s Nov. 6 announcement says the technology adds information to support work controllers already do, and the agency selected the Frequentis system for deployment after years of testing at its William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and elsewhere. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said digital towers provide controllers with greater visibility of airport activity and more information to support critical decisions.

The FAA’s digital towers program page describes what the kit adds: high-definition cameras, sensors, infrared cameras, automatic target detection, aircraft data tags and playback of ambient airfield sound in the control room. Evaluators also measure the delay between an event on the airfield and its appearance on a controller’s display, to confirm the picture arrives fast enough for safe operations. The first system design approval went to Frequentis’s smartVISION for single-runway airports in Class D airspace, a process that usually takes about 24 to 36 months.

The Bartow build, from the airport authority’s side

Airport Improvement’s profile, written before the launch, fills in the physical layout. A 76-foot structure carries 360-degree pan-tilt-zoom and thermal cameras, and the images stream to 15 screens of 55 inches arranged in a 130-degree arc. John Helms, executive director of the Bartow Airport Authority, noted that nothing happens behind the controllers, and he called the technology a potential solution for the rest of the country.

The project cost $6.1 million, paid by Florida Department of Transportation grants, and the same article says Winter Haven Regional Airport, seven nautical miles away, was slated for control testing in July 2026. The original 1943 tower at Bartow remains in use. Bartow also runs a 12-month controller training program with Polk County Public Schools and Traviss Technical College, capped at four new students a month.

The timeline there ran in stages. Airport Improvement lists the project as running from March 2023 to November 2025, active control testing in January 2026 and a target of full air traffic control services in July 2026, while AvWeb says Bartow began operating its system in September. Blake Swafford of Hanson Professional Services said the state funded the tower, for all practical purposes, as a test site for Florida, and Shahriar Sami of Frequentis said the new technology speaks to the next generation.

Frequentis, for its part, says on its U.S. page that its Digital Tower Solution rebuilds a traditional tower’s panoramic view from a 360-degree camera array and was developed with the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. It calls Bartow’s tower one of the oldest in the nation. That is a vendor’s description rather than an FAA finding.

Five more airports and a $50 million fund

The FAA names five airports as next: Winter Haven Regional and Venice Municipal in Florida, Montgomery County Airpark in Maryland, Johnston Regional in North Carolina, and Durango-La Plata County in Colorado. All five are non-towered today, and the FAA release says they will soon get digital towers, funded by the Working Families Tax Cut Act.

AvWeb’s report ties the law to a $50 million allocation for digital tower deployment, and the FAA program page frames the money as help for qualified non-towered airports. The legal groundwork goes back further, since the program page traces a 2018 reauthorization pilot that began testing digital towers as a lower-cost option and a 2024 reauthorization that required a framework and timeline for approvals.

People are part of the build as well as hardware. According to Airport Improvement, the Bartow trainees begin on traditional tower training and move later to the digital tower, and 11 students were enrolled in the program as of October. If the model spreads to the five airports named by the FAA, the same question of where new controllers learn to read a video wall will follow it to Maryland, North Carolina and Colorado.

The sources leave a few things open. AvWeb’s report does not say who staffs the Bartow or Kenai towers or where Kenai’s controllers sit, and it gives no system or cost details for Kenai. The program page limits approved systems to Class D airspace at single-runway airports, and it still carries the timeline of a September milestone in the past tense. For the five new airports, the dates when each one goes live have not been published.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.