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AVIATION SOLUTIONS SPECIALIST SKILLS Few projects present a greater range of engineering


challenges than airports. Here are just some of the areas in which WSP Genivar’s specialist teams are providing the answers


GATE A3 Securing an airport is one thing, but


how do you provide the same level of protection to an entire city without making it an unpleasant place to live and work?


AIRPORT SECURITY GATE G1


That’s the question that WSP Genivar’s aviation security team have been considering in some depth, as part of the masterplan for HIA Airport City, a new 10km2 development centred around the Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar. WSP Genivar is providing consultancy services on engineering, infrastructure and utilities, sustainability, aviation and security, working with architect OMA.


DE-ICING


“Traditionally, airports have been built in rural areas, and urbanisation would slowly envelop them over time,” says David Kimmerly,


head of security consulting,


AIRPORT LIGHTING GATE A6


BAGGAGE HANDLING GATE F4


ICT and AV at WSP Genivar in the Middle East. “Now we’re seeing airports used as a launching point for urban development, within developing cities rather than on the outskirts. HIA Airport City is designed to have a direct, symbiotic relationship with the airport itself, so we have the challenge of balancing a public and open community with a very secure airport.”


Kimmerly’s team have taken a risk management-based approach, first eliminating conflicting land uses by breaking the development into commercial, logistical and residential districts. “We started by asking, what are the threats and where are the greatest risks to the community? How will the community be affected by the airport, and vice versa? We can’t tell each building owner how to run their own security, but we can provide standards and recommended practices to create an integrated and community-based approach to security.” The aim is to create consistency throughout the development: “This way, you won’t have one building with a good security programme, while the next hasn’t considered it and is potentially creating a vulnerability to the community.”


Blanketing the project with CCTV coverage was felt to be inappropriate: “We tried to be more culturally sensitive and cost-effective in our security solutions,” Kimmerly explains. “Rather than just having a big system that is intended to monitor people, we have developed a strategy to allow planners to integrate security as a feature of


the built environment, not as a bolt-on. In


12 SOLUTIONS


some cases, by simply by providing a different type of landscaping you can take an unsecured area and make it much safer.” Other examples could be effective for security and profitable for developers, such as including a cafe to provide an area of community engagement and activity, increasing natural surveillance. “The public are much more effective at detecting and reporting an incident than a security camera,” Kimmerly points out.


Within airports themselves there is also a drive for a smarter, more efficient, yet less invasive, approach to security to enable growing passenger numbers to be screened effectively without compromising the passenger experience. “Security has largely become a negative aspect of air travel, especially in the US and Europe,” says Kimmerly. “You can have the best airport in the world, but if it takes over an hour to go through security, it’s not a comfortable experience. With increased competition between airports, security is one of the factors that customers will use to decide on how they fly.”


Airlines and customs agencies are now starting to segregate passengers according to risk. Many of the passengers that pass through airports each day are frequent flyers, he points out, and these passengers would be able to provide personal information and undergo a background check to be part of a “known traveller” programme. “Once they have been cleared in this way, biometric information can be used to validate identities more quickly than a standard paper passport,” he says. “It’s a numbers game in airports, which often have finite resources and space allocated to security. If you can take off three minutes here, five minutes there, it really does improve the customer experience, while allowing for growth within an existing airport.”


SOLUTIONS SPECIAL


THE FLYING SQUAD


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