FAA puts its first digital control towers into service

The Federal Aviation Administration announced on November 6 that the country's first digital control towers are operating at Bartow Executive Airport in Florida and Kenai Municipal Airport in Alaska. Cameras supply controllers with a continuous 360-degree view of runways, taxiways and nearby airspace; the humans remain on duty, making the operational decisions.

Five more airports will receive the systems under funding from President Trump's Working Families Tax Cut Act: 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. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford framed the change as better tools for the existing workforce: controllers, he said, "continue to do the critical job of keeping aircraft safely separated, and we're giving them better technology to do that."

The technology itself is roughly a decade old. A traditional tower puts controllers above the airport looking through windows; a digital tower replaces the windows with cameras, sensors and dedicated displays. Remote towers have been in routine operational use in Scandinavia since the mid-2010s, and the FAA is presenting as new a configuration that Scandinavian airfields have long since run in production. At Bartow, a Frequentis platform installed in summer 2025 unifies radio, telephone, recording and weather information on a single system; Frequentis USA president Dieter Eier said the deployment would "lay the foundation for digital tower operations in the U.S."

The first sites set the pattern. The five airports next in line are non-towered fields today — places where a staffed glass cabin never justified its cost. A digital tower decouples the controller from the airfield, which is where both the savings and the new risks live. When the video feed is everything the tower sees, the connection becomes a security question; the FAA notes that "digital" describes the equipment, not the location of the controllers, and one operations center can now serve — or fail for — several airfields at once.

The digital tower's competition was never the glass cabin but the absence of one.