Sepura – Driving safety and operational efficiency at airports with digital communications

Driving safety and operational efficiency at airports with digital communications

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 Exupry 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 and Spain’s Madrid-Barajas airports, 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.

Rosanna Norman
Marketing Communications Manager
Sepura plc
Radio House, St Andrew’s Road
Cambridge, CB4 1GR, UK
T: +44 (0) 1223 877283
M: +44 (0) 7887 942274
F: +44 (0) 1223 879000
www.sepura.com