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Challenge
Keep airport operations running smoothly and ensure safety and security by improving and extending communications capabilities.
Solution
Deploy Sepura digital hand-held, in-vehicle and fixed radios for clear, reliable communications between control rooms and staff, and within work groups. Use built-in radio features including automated man-down functionality to enhance workers' personal safety.
Results
Increased operational efficiency through rapid, reliable communications, extended TETRA coverage, and data and wireless capabilities. Improved worker safety and compliance with relevant employment legislation.
Airports across the world face similar sets of challenges. Planes must be cleaned and refuelled, catering supplies restocked, passengers safely boarded and disembarked, and baggage correctly handled. Flight schedules must be respected, guard tours managed, and customs and security checks carried out. Above all, airport and airline staff and the public must be kept safe, and stringent safety standards applying to a variety of operational environments must be met.
Airports are overwhelmingly busy, noisy places, with many activities taking place out of doors and in all weathers — so clear and reliable communications are vital to operational efficiency and personal safety.
Activities like plane refuelling, patrolling car parks and working in hangars all present potential hazards, with lone workers especially vulnerable. And if an incident occurs, emergency crews must be rapidly deployed and able to stay in touch with each other and with the control room.
Ensuring TETRA coverage throughout the airport
Thousands of Sepura digital hand-held and in-vehicle radios are providing secure, reliable voice and data communications over TETRA networks at national and international airports around the world. Sepura radios are designed to withstand harsh operational environments and provide exceptional audio performance that can overcome the extreme background noise experienced at airports.
These capabilities are among the reasons why France's Lyon–Saint Exupéry Airport, serving 8 million passengers a year, selected Sepura digital hand-held radios. The radios are deployed to various teams across the airport's 2,000 hectare site to keep operations — including baggage handling, engineering, fire and rescue, and security — running smoothly.
Sepura hand-held radios' high transmitter power (1.8 watts) extends TETRA network coverage where lower-powered radios struggle. This has made a real difference at France's Paris–Charles de Gaulle airport, where coverage is available in buildings and hangars for the first time, with no need to invest in feeding cable or in-building repeaters.
Coverage can be further extended with Sepura's powerful SRG gateway radios. These can act as a relay point for other hand-held and in-vehicle radios, stretching the trunked network into airport black spots or to distant workers at the fringes of network coverage.
Because Sepura hand-held and in-vehicle radios have the same intuitive user interface, airport workers can switch between them easily and confidently. And for roles that require hands-free operation, such as engineers on the runway, Bluetooth headsets can be connected wirelessly to Sepura radios, maintaining audio quality and freeing users from cabled connections.
Boosting resource management efficiency
Sepura radios include GPS positioning, enabling an airport like Lyon–Saint Exupéry to locate the position of every single radio being used by a member of staff or in a vehicle. To ensure pinpoint in-building accuracy at all times, over 150 radio beacons have been installed across the airport's indoor areas. Optional GPS reporting enables an airport's operational management to deploy the most appropriate resource for each task, and keep track of users wherever they're working, both indoors and outside.
To keep all members of a work group fully informed about a project or an incoming flight, airports use dynamic talk group allocation. At Paris–Charles de Gaulle airport, where it deploys 3,500 Sepura radios, Air France ground crews are assigned to a new talk group for each incoming flight.
As the plane approaches, each crew member receives the new talk group identifier on their Sepura radio. Only those team members assigned to the talk group can communicate with each other, so there are no interference and delays in the communications. Air France reports a 50% reduction in the number of people needed to prepare a plane since implementing the Sepura solution.
Team members send status messages from their radios to update the central computer system as they've completed their tasks, such as cleaning, unloading luggage and refuelling. The computer monitors progress and identifies any delays, enabling flight management to send extra staff if required to keep the flight on time. Once the plane has taken off, the talk group is automatically disbanded.
It's Sepura digital radio features like these that the Brazilian airports administrator, Infraero, is counting on to help agents manage the influx of millions of people at Brazil's 18 main airports during the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Maintaining worker safety and airport security
Sepura radios incorporate vital security and safety features to protect individual workers. In addition to GPS positioning, that shows the location of each radio user, a dedicated emergency button on the radios makes it easy for a worker to request assistance. Pressing the button automatically sets up a priority voice call to alert the control centre as well as colleagues in the same talk group.
The safety of lone workers is further enhanced by motion-sensing technology in Sepura hand-held radios that generates automatic man-down alerts, complete with the user's location. And if a man-down alert is generated in error, the user can simply tap the screen of the radio to cancel it. Air France, operating out of Paris–Charles de Gaulle airport, relies on the man-down feature of Sepura radios to ensure its compliance with duty of care legislation regarding lone workers.
And for airports that require end-to-end encryption (E2EE) of communications as part of a strategy to protect against terrorist attacks, Sepura radios are E2EE hardware ready: the airport simply needs to acquire a software licence to implement E2EE.
Rapid configuration, extensive data capability
At Roma–Fiumicino, Italy's largest international hub, 500 Sepura radios have been implemented alongside DAMM infrastructure for the TETRA network. Sepura and DAMM installed the entire solution in a single night, without interruption to any of the airport's activities.
Sepura Radio Manager, a PC-based software application, automates the setup and configuration of radio functionality and group working, provides asset tracking, and enables radios to be managed and customised locally and remotely.
Radio Manager typically makes it possible to implement around 1,000 radios in a single day, saving time and money, and with no need for specialist support.
Wide-ranging data capabilities, including Status, SDS, WAP and packet data, allow seamless integration of Sepura digital radios with airport IT systems for end-to-end data communications. Users can, for example, download information from a central IT system, such as a map or a photo of a passenger to be searched. Once downloaded, the user can store the information on the radio's memory card and retrieve it later with no need for a network connection. In addition, Bluetooth capability lets staff use their Sepura radios as modems with their PDAs and laptops in order to speed up data communications for real-time information transfer.
Airports using Sepura digital TETRA radios
Bulgaria: Sofia
Denmark: Billund
France: Lyon–Saint Exupéry, Paris–Charles de Gaulle (Air France)
Germany: Hannover
Greece: Athens
India: Bangalore, Hyderabad
Italy: Roma–Fiumicino
Qatar: Doha
Spain: A Coruña, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Madrid–Barajas, Minorca, Santiago, Seville, Vigo
UAE: Dubai
UK: Birmingham
