Reconfiguring stand designs: How Beca maintained efficiency and safety at Auckland Airport with AviPLAN
Company | Transoft Solutions |
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Date | 26.09.2024 |
Beca is one of Asia Pacific’s largest independent advisory, design and engineering consultancies. The company has grown from a family-owned business to a progressive, client-centric professional services consultancy. Beca has more than 4,000 employees in 25 offices around the world and has delivered projects in more than 70 countries.
Client Need
Stand 10 at Auckland Airport in New Zealand was designed as a Code E max full service contact stand but a reconfiguration project was later launched to accommodate Code F aircraft. The existing fixed link would be maintained along with a new passenger boarding bridge, also referred to as an aerobridge, and this would be supplemented with a second fixed link and new bridge.
Wayne Napier, Associate Civil Engineering – Airports at Beca, comments: “The challenge was to try and get a second fixed link plus another aerobridge in the limited space available, whilst still maintaining the aircraft serviceability down to a Code C aircraft.”
The proposed Stand 10 revisions had to be modelled to assess their impact on ramp operations, ground service equipment storage, staging and access for aircraft servicing, maintenance requirements, and overall operational utility and service quality, while ensuring compliance with safety and regulatory standards.
Solution
Beca utilized Transoft Solutions’ AviPLAN software to model the Auckland Airport Stand 10 reconfiguration.
The software enabled Beca to design, and validate, different iterations to maximize the stand’s layout and operational efficiency while taking into account existing infrastructure such as fuel hydrants, floodlight towers and egress stairs on adjacent stands.
AviPLAN is a complete CAD software solution for safe and accurate airside planning and design. It can be used to model revisions to apron layouts, develop complex stands with multiple boarding bridges, design taxiways and fillets, and generate detailed ground markings. It can assess safety clearances, jet blast impact, and operational efficiency.
Transoft offers four AviPLAN products – from the comprehensive AviPLAN Airside Pro to AviPLAN Turn. The software suits all requirements, from busy, multi-fleet international airports that accommodate intercontinental flights to smaller regional airports.
All AviPLAN products feature an extensive library of passenger, cargo and military airplanes and helicopters, plus ground support vehicles, modeled according to manufacturer specifications. A library of passenger boarding bridges for designing contact stands is also available in AviPLAN Airside and Airside Pro.
Data outputs from AviPLAN assist in spatial planning, and provide stakeholders – including airport managers/planners, ground handling staff, and airline staff – with a clear picture of any restrictions presented by a redesigned stand.
Utilizing AviPLAN for Auckland Airport Stand 10 enabled Beca to efficiently analyze the operational impacts of adapting the existing passenger boarding bridge, and adding a new fixed link. The system modeled, and tested, operations from Code F down to Code C while maintaining existing operations.
The system, notes Napier, “has the ability to produce complex turnaround simulations based on the servicing arrangement in the aircraft planning manuals or self-configured variants that align with local equipment and procedures”.
AviPLAN can be used to simulate the sequenced arrival and departure of all required service vehicles, to prove that the design geometry will allow safe and timely operations.
To read about the implementation and download the case study, please click here.
Contact
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