The Next Era for Airports in India

After more thAn A century of air travel across the world, airports have transformed radically from simple transitory stations to sophisticated commercial hubs, which are as complex to operate as small cities. Fast-moving technological developments in aerospace infrastructure, flight operations and managerial intelligence are serving to usher in a new era of airport functionality. Further, with the proliferation of more pervasive connectivity, access to more bandwidth at lower costs, reduced data storage maintenance as well information processing and comprehensive analytics – a new paradigm for aircraft and airport connectivity has been created.

Here in India, airports across the five major metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai have experienced a rapid transformation and any recent traveller will testify to their international standards. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has put in place a laudable goal of upgrading all of the country’s airports within a span of 10 years to ensure better connectivity within the country as well as to international destinations. This is a crucial move as passenger numbers across the country are expected to reach 540 million annually by 2025 up from 169 million witnessed in 2013-14. However, operator margins have remained tight despite continued growth in passengers. Thus, lowering of operational costs has become one of the key challenges in the Indian aviation industry.

To cope with the country’s growth, new airport systems need to be adopted to significantly streamline the growing air traffic. There has to be a closer synchronisation between the facets of air traffic flow management, air traffic control, aircraft operators, ground handling and airport operations. In essence, creating an ecosystem of next generation, satellite-based technologies that provides flight crews, passengers as well as maintenance and operations personnel with real-time seamless access to information is pivotal. Further, airports must be able to know their future resource needs by traffic forecasting done by simulation softwares. In other words, India’s airports of the future need to become smarter.

It would serve the authorities operating these various aviation hubs well to make note of some of the newer technologies that would assist them to address multiple situations being faced by operations staff and travellers. For instance, Near Field Communications (NFC) can make the experience of flying seamless by reducing processes and allowing direct contact with the passenger. For example, unmanned boarding will automatically admit travellers by reading the boarding pass stored on their phones. In addition, providing phone notifications in the event of travel disruptions and immigration procedures will ensure a more tranquil travel experience. Hence, airport operators should ideally look at investing further in solutions that further consolidate their current Wi-Fi networks and enhance their cloud infrastructure to allow for better movement of passengers through an airport terminal.

For its part, Honeywell has engineered several technologies to help enhance the overall flow of infrastructure management. For instance, a series of hardware solutions and systems can intelligently manage ambient temperature and lighting to ensure passengers are comfortable in the terminal building, while at the same time reducing energy consumption. In fact, providing ecofriendly solutions is critical, as the AAI has sent a clear signal that this will be one of their requirements for future airport development. A prime example of this is when the Cochin International was unveiled as the world’s first airport to be run on solar power. While this a commendable step forward, much more needs to be done across other major aviation hubs across the country.

As India is one of the fastest growing domestic aviation markets, optimising the country’s current air traffic flow and safety systems is crucial. Hence, to assist with this, the AAI and the US-India Aviation Cooperation Program, signed an official agreement in 2013 to collaborate and launch the Honeywell SmartPath Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS) pilot project at the Chennai International Airport. The airport itself is the third busiest in India, in terms of international and overall passenger traffic, handling over 10.5 million travellers a year. The new project will be a part of the AAI’s Air Traffic Management (ATM) upgrade programme, and the implementation of SmartPath will provide airlines with the benefit of reduced fuel consumption and lower fuel costs by as much as 12 per cent due to shorter circling and extended landing queues. More importantly, the SmartPath system will help significantly minimise any chance of flight path overlaps from occurring. Hence, based on the success of this project, the AAI has plans to consider implementing a similar system at other major airports across the country.

While the journey towards completing the defined target of upgraded aviation hubs within the next 10 years is a formidable one, the right steps are being taken to guarantee its completion. Thus, various stakeholders in India’s aerospace sector should look to streamline the sanction and implementation processes to put in place solutions that can greatly increase the overall capacity handling of airports as well as reduce their respective carbon footprints and enhance safety. By doing so, the country’s aviation hubs would also be able to handle a larger volume of air cargo and remove the current challenge of transport aircraft competing for take-off and landing space with commercial aircraft. Hence, various market players should aim to develop and offer the AAI solutions that will aid in creating a smarter airport ecosystem, which will in turn power both the local and national economies.