A striking feature of the Stockholm control room is its hushed working environment. “I’ve been in many different control rooms in different organizations and this is by far the quietest”, says Janis Lövgren, system architect. “Even during big incidents it is very quiet and people just work.”

Steve Denison, of APD Communications, which supplied the control room’s Cortex radio and telecoms subsystems, comments: “We took the first Emirates airline room live probably a couple of years ago now, and I must confess I was hesitant to make my normal claim that, when you put Cortex in, it will quieten down, because it was pretty quiet anyway.

“At that point, they were using free-issue radios and gooseneck microphones. But when they did put in, it actually got quieter still. 

“I wouldn’t like to say how it compares with this – but the integration and the common headset working with Cortex does make it quieter. I would imagine that countries using a different model, like Germany, are quite different because they do a lot of monitoring on speakers.”

“We do prefer using a headset”, responds Janis. “The German way of using up to 12 or 16 speakers for audio monitoring purposes seems a bit... well, we’ve heard of audio mixing! I do know quite a few people working there, but I haven’t managed to track down anyone who can explain what are the operational benefits!”