SWFL air traffic controller lands patent-pending tech service

From a young age, Tyler Hansen was fascinated by planes, trains, and automobiles. So it’s not all that surprising that after enlisting in the U.S. Navy, he pursued air traffic control and wound up controlling the Blue Angels.

He’s now been in air traffic control for more than a decade, for the Navy, contract towers, and currently the FAA. It’s a field that requires split-second decision making and an ability to stay calm.

Photo by Mark Wemple

“You can’t let yourself get too far ahead emotionally, and you also can’t dwell on what just happened,” says Hansen. “You have to constantly reassess the picture in front of you and make the next good decision.”

Over the course of his career, he realized that the airport surface is one of the least optimized parts of the gate-to-gate operation. So on nights and days off, he began working to turn those observations into a solution, founding Aerodrome Systems and developing a patent-pending decision-support tool to optimize aircraft taxi routing in real time. 

“I saw something in the operation that I believed could be done better,” he says. “And eventually I reached a point where I decided I would rather try to build something around the idea than spend another 10 years just talking about the problem.”

It hasn’t been easy building a solution like this while also working full-time. But that on-the-job insight has also provided distinct advantages. “Solving an air traffic control problem isn’t just about building something technically impressive,” he says. “It has to be something controllers can trust, that fits into the environment that already exists and that creates value without disrupting the mission. I felt like I understood the operation well enough to define what the solution would actually need to do.”

His father, Clint, has had a big impact on who he is today. “From an early age, he instilled in myself and my siblings that if you start something, you do not quit until the job is done,” he says. “You give that job 100% and leave nothing to doubt.”

The people sitting next to him on the job have also taught him a lot. “Good trainers and experienced controllers don’t just teach you the rules or phraseology,” says Hansen. “They teach you how to think, how to recognize when an operation is starting to deteriorate and how to stay ahead of it.”

Skilled controllers tend to make complicated situations look simple, says Hansen, and that’s how he’s approaching his work on Aerodrome Systems too. “I’m very interested in technology that helps the operation become more proactive,” he says, “rather than simply reacting once a problem is already obvious.”