Image copyright AP Heathrow Airport in London, is one of the world’s largest and may be about to grow even more with the current discussion around the building a third runway landing and an expansion of its terminals.
Located in the west of the capital, the base covers an area of over 12 square kilometers, in which circulate over 70 million passengers per year.
The BBC Future got exclusive access behind the scenes of this is the busiest airport in Europe to find out what it takes to keep something as complex functioning in the best possible way.
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second Accuracy
About 1,350 aircraft take off or land at Heathrow each day. – an aircraft every 45 seconds
To ensure the safety and this movement is working efficiency for air traffic controllers. Jon Proudlove, service manager, explains that the planning process of each takeoff and landing begins six months before. “Everything we do have to follow that plan,” he explains.
The BBC Future visited Heathrow on a crucial day, when the system Time Based Separation (TBS) was triggered.
According Proudlove, it is a radical change for the control of flights. Now, instead of the planes have to maintain a certain distance from each other, they have to be separated by time. Engineers expect the new system to reduce delays and enable a greater number of take off airplanes or hang up at any time
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Modern aircraft are able to send a huge amount of information from the cockpit to ground controllers, including its speed and wind site speed.
The TBS system combines weather data and information coming from aircraft, and gives drivers a clear sense about the conditions of vortices – the turbulent air left behind by the aircraft. So they can decide on the speed with which this whirlwind is disspiando and is dangerous to other aircraft flying close behind.
The Nats company in charge of air traffic control Heathrow, tracked 150,000 landings at the airport and made models of the vortices left behind by these aircraft. This allowed us to calculate a safe interval between them, based on the conditions at certain times.
Since it was started, the system was declared a success, reducing delays related to winds, while maintaining security.
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Punctuality and safety
The British airport should receive even more technological innovations. He is the second in the world to use an updated version of the landing system instruments (ILS, its acronym in English), behind Zurich airport in Switzerland.
The ILS emits a wave of radio to which the planes were “cling” to be able to get off the track. With the new system, this wave can be narrowed by increasing the number of aircraft that can land and take off safely.
Another key aspect to maintain the smooth operation of Heathrow are ground operations. Steve Xerri, track manager, deals with compliance issues to the airport rules and something perhaps even more important today:. Punctuality
An airport is like an extremely complicated network of moving parts, and the role of Xerri is trying to keep everything working in harmony
To perform his work, I often have to drive through the aircraft or to follow them closely. – and that’s not for the faint <. /> p>
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Airport operations are monitored at the Airfield Operations Facility (AOF), a similar control room with the tower air traffic commands. One of the most important tasks here is the detection of debris – something crucial, since even a small missing piece can have devastating effects on an airplane
New technologies now allow the monitoring of the tracks is more accurate. . A specific radar installed on a tower “looks” for aircraft but also to what is happening on the ground.
Every 90 seconds, the radar scans the slopes in search of objects that can cause problems if they are hit by the wheels of an aircraft or are inhaled by turbines. Any little piece the size of a coin is able to generate an alert. Cameras are trained on the site and operators evaluate the risks.
In the past, all this was done by a person who went through drive the path parallel to the track, with binoculars in search of these objects.
All this work takes place almost invisibly to the millions of passengers who pass through Heathrow each year. “We are currently operating at 98% of our capacity. Therefore, any space we have available is used for aircraft,” Xerri said.
As his colleague Proudlove, “at Heathrow, every second counts . “
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Read original version of this article in English at BBC Future .
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