Inside Melbourne’s air traffic control hub

Recently, Australian Aviation was invited to Airservices’ Melbourne centre for a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility – and a glimpse at its future.

Training comes full circle

The tour begins in Airservices’ 360-degree tower simulator, which is used to train new air traffic controllers. With screens on almost every side and true-to-life workstations, the space can be reconfigured within minutes to simulate any tower in the country – we saw both Sydney and Melbourne while we were there, right down to the McDonald’s on General Holmes Drive.

Airservices ATC training occurs in Melbourne and is paid, with graduates then being sent to the Melbourne or Brisbane control room if they’re working en route, or to one of Airservices’ 29 control towers across Australia. The company says 80 new ATCs are due in the 2024 financial year.

To join the program, candidates must pass a rigorous aptitude test, designed to find the small slice of the population capable of working in ATC to Airservices’ standards – rounds include shapes and patterns, simulated radar screens, and identifying which numbered balls on a screen are about to collide.

According to star trainee Dom Brennan, however, you don’t need to be a “mega-mind genius” or a chess grandmaster to work in air traffic control.

“What they look for when they’re recruiting is people who have an eagerness to solve problems. It also helps being able to multitask and have a sound level of critical thinking,” Brennan says.

“That’s what really helped me in my training. It’s just a constant drive to fix problems so that even when there are no problems on your airspace, you just keep looking for them.”

Shifting control

The tour next takes us to Melbourne’s control room, which handles around 6 per cent of the world’s airspace – an additional 5 per cent falls under Brisbane’s flight information region (FIR). The Melbourne FIR encompasses not just the southern half of Australia – with six of the eight capital cities, including the busy airspace around the Sydney basin – but huge swathes of the Indian and Southern Oceans.

The current control centre, however, is not long for this world: in the next few years, Airservices is aiming to unify air traffic control – both civil and military – across Australian airspace in the OneSKY program with an integrated Civil Military Air Traffic Management System (CMATS).

This not only means civilian and military flights will be able to coordinate much better, with military operations less likely to get in the way of civil air traffic but will also allow all of Australia’s airspace to be controlled holistically across the Brisbane and Melbourne centres without needing to be divided between the two.

The new CMATS room in Melbourne is still under construction when we visit, but when complete, will be able to handle flights anywhere in Australia in a new, more resilient facility, with improvements to security as well as reliability of infrastructure like power, water and networks.

David Webb, who is in charge of the OneSKY program at Airservices, tells us that the improvements to network flow under CMATS will make Australian airspace safer and more predictable.

“We know where the airspace is coming up, we know where the flights are going, we know where they all are with a higher fidelity than we already do,” he says. “That makes it better for the passengers because your flights become more predictable, and also, rather than having a sudden change to the route, the airlines can be more likely to fly on time because they know exactly the route that is going to be available to them.”

View from the top

Offering what planespotters would undoubtedly consider one of the best views in the country, Melbourne’s new 75-metre air traffic control tower – opened in 2014 – dwarfs the old tower, which is a forlorn sight visible from the windows.

As we watch between window cleanings, tower controllers direct 737s, A320s, A380s, and even a Singapore Airlines Cargo 747 in a complicated dance of landings, take-offs, and taxis, assisted by touch-screen INTAS (Integrated Tower Automation Suite) workstations that bring together flight and operational data with comms and surveillance.

A slightly quirkier helper catches our eye – a rubber chicken perched near one of the consoles, which an employee tells us serves as a somewhat light-hearted alert for when the automatic terminal information service (ATIS) information changes.

“The chicken is an aural cue for staff who are on the console who may not otherwise notice the visual cue that the ATIS has changed,” he explains. “In the old tower, we used to have an aural cue, you’d just have to press a button. This is sort of like a go-between, something that’s changed over from the old tower.”

While the physical towers will be around for a long time yet, Airservices is also set to deploy digital aerodrome services – effectively virtual towers, viewed remotely through cameras and sensors – at more airports around Australia, including at Ballina Byron in northern NSW and the new Western Sydney International Airport to open in 2026.

According to Webb, virtual towers not only save money and can be set up more quickly, but they also provide real safety benefits with the ability to quickly spot unexpected people or vehicles on runways and keep track of different aircraft.

“In a tower environment, you need to be looking out the window to see what’s going on. When you replace that with screens, the camera can spot the aircraft for you and tag it for you. So rather than go ‘where is Alpha Bravo Charlie?’, various systems have already picked it up for you,” he says.

“You have the same controller doing the same job they do, with all these enhancements for themselves that do it a lot more safely.”

Blazing new trails

Our final stop is all about another big part of Airservices’ remit: the provision of aviation rescue firefighting (ARFF) services at 27 of the busiest airports in Australia. Airservices currently employs more than 830 firefighters, with another 48 expected to join this year.

Melbourne has a dedicated ARFF training facility, with a full-scale aircraft model set up that can be set on fire at numerous points, including on the ground and in the engines, to allow trainee firefighters to experience fighting real-world fires both in trucks and on foot.

To give us a sense of what aviation firefighters go to, we are suited up ourselves and placed at the controls of a firefighting truck as the model is set ablaze. It turns out that aiming and shooting the massive water cannons is trickier than it looks – you have to manage the width of the spray and time your bursts so as not to exhaust the water supply. We’re also given the opportunity to hold the hose on foot, which requires a lot of bracing the feet and shifting the stance so as not to be bowled backwards by the massive water pressure. It’s hot and sweaty work, and we’re glad to be out of the suits by the end.

Of course, even firefighting training is changing as well – while the real-life model isn’t going away, Airservices is also implementing virtual-reality training using state-of-the-art simulations that let firefighters experience a multitude of different emergency scenarios with different aircraft in different conditions.

According to Airservices’ transformation program manager Gavin Arnott, the XVR Simulation training software, which last year netted Airservices a platinum award for Best in Virtual Reality at the LearnX Awards, allows teams to learn in a risk-free environment.

“We are investing heavily in the capability so that it is real as it could possibly be, even to the extent of holding a hose and spraying foam, that the feel would be exactly the same,” he says.

“These simulators are not only safer for our team, but also more efficient in time and resources.”

Strapping on a headset, it’s immediately clear what he means – opening up the virtual hose causes the physical replica of the hose in your hands to pull back hard on the reel, simulating the pressure from the water, while flames and smoke respond realistically to the spray of virtual foam.

“If we can make it safer, and we don’t have the environmental impact, we don’t have to go out to a training ground and we can do it virtually, then we’re going to do it,” says Arnott. “You’re going to see us switch to areas where 60-70 per cent of this training can be done virtually … where everything today is physical.”

Virtual firefighting training, virtual towers, and the ability to digitally manage airspace anywhere in the country from either control centre – Airservices is betting big on the digital transformation to overhaul air traffic management in Australia.

As CEO Jason Harfield tells us, Airservices must answer the question: how does it continue to perform its vital functions, while simultaneously updating and preparing for the future of aviation in Australia?

“It’s not about looking to shut up shop on a Friday night and sit there and say we’re going to retool and redo and then start up again,” Harfield says. “We have to not only continue to deliver but also change at the same time.”