SAAB - Up with Airport Efficiency
Company | Saab Sensis |
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Date | 29.09.2014 |
The Aerobahn system has been installed in about two dozen airports around the world, including five of the ten busiest in the United States. Using sensors on the ground that communicate with transponders on the aircraft, Aerobahn gives airport and airline officials a real-time picture of everything that’s going on outside the terminal. This includes the exact location of each aircraft at the gates, on the runways and in the nearby airspace.
Dan London, Saab’s Director of Airline and Airport Automation, describes the Airport Status Dashboard, one of the products within the Aerobahn platform. “It offers users a set of tools to collect, record, distribute and receive alerts on status information for all of the key components of airport operations,” he says.
“How many flights are anticipated to depart in the next four hours? What’s the departure queue length? What’s the average delay?.” By making departures more efficient, the system can reduce planes’ taxiing time, thus saving fuel costs for the airlines and cutting carbon emissions. At the airport in Denver, Colorado, Saab installed a system that minimises bottlenecks in the de-icing process for planes during winter weather.
“The system sequences the aircraft to arrive at the de-icing pads so that their output matches the runway capacity,” London says. “The less time that those aircraft engines are running, the less greenhouse gases are being produced.”
Looking to the future, Aerobahn may also be able to let airlines know if a train taking passengers from one terminal to another is experiencing delays. If travellers have to stay overnight because of a flight cancellation, the system may be able to tell the airlines which hotels in the area have rooms available.
London says that the “jewel in the crown” for Aerobahn is the system at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. “Before we put in our system, that airport had a reputation for having lengthy departure queues during peak periods,” he says. “Aircraft would power up to move 50 metres, then power down, then power up. That’s a lot of waste.” The Aerobahn Departure Management System optimises the sequence of aircraft by giving them designated times to push back from the gate. Now planes arrive at the runway in an organised manner.
“At any airport, the perfect departure is when an aircraft closes the door, pushes back and goes to the runway without ever stopping,” London says.“That’s the utopian environment we’re trying to create.”
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