Kenai airport is one of the first two in the US with a working digital control tower

Kenai Municipal Airport is one of the first two U.S. airports with a working digital air traffic control tower, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday.

The other is Bartow Executive Airport in Florida.

Digital towers use cameras and displays to give controllers a continuous, 360-degree view of the airport and the airspace around it, the agency said. Controllers still manage the airspace.

"Digital towers provide controllers with greater visibility of airport activity and more information to make critical decisions," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.

Kenai was chosen as Alaska's first demonstration site for remote air traffic control partly for its mix of traffic and surfaces, according to FAA slides shown to the Kenai Airport Commission this year. Its paved, gravel and seaplane surfaces would produce meaningful evaluation data, the slides said. The slides said the existing tower would stay fully operational as a backup, running side by side with the new system so the FAA could check how it performs.

The FAA hired Frequentis USA without competition for the first phase in Kenai. The agency has committed about $8.3 million to that contract so far, according to federal spending records.

In September, the FAA approved the design of Frequentis's system for certain contract tower airports with a single runway. At a congressional hearing last December, Bedford said the first deployments would go to airports with single runways rather than crossing or parallel ones, calling it a "crawl, walk, run process." Kenai has parallel runways.

The FAA says five more airports without towers will get digital ones, in Florida, Maryland, North Carolina and Colorado, using money from a federal law the agency calls the Working Families Tax Cut Act. None is in Alaska.

But the FAA slides said the agency is interested in bringing the technology to other Alaska airports, and that Kenai would be the model for how it could work across the state.