Airport Incident: Secure Communications Collaboration

The Scenario An aircraft on approach and landing creates an airport incident. Emergency crews and vehicles respond to the incident. The Fire Chief, Police Chief, Airport Operations and Executive Officers are off-duty and evening personnel, who are trained to handle the incident, are inexperienced in handling a real incident.

The Problem

Today’s airports are faced with ever-increasing demands for immediate information and communication to support incident management, and the increased need to support maintenance and other workers meet their day to day missions.

Although the tremendous growth in WiFi and the internet provides support to mobile workers, current access methods falls short of the requirement for an easy-to-use, secure, instantaneous communications.

Airport system integration and complexity require highly specialized key workers to maintain them. Systems designed to proactively report anomalies are most effective, if critical information is delivered immediately to mobile workers.

The ability to manage and control an incident or respond to anomalies from multiple locations, including staff home offices, hotels, conference centers, any partner and service locations has forced airports to seek new communications solutions.

Airports have already made investments in various communications devices, cell or mobile phones, PDA’s, laptop PCs, WiFi phones, CCTV and other interactive devices. The need to provide a common unified communications system where existing devices are used and not discarded has become part of most every airport’s technology plans.

With this increased demand for instant communications comes the added burden of security, survivability and scalability. No current single solution provides all of these features.

What is needed is a new approach to the way that humans not only communicate, but how they interact.

The Solution The Command Control Center activates our Incident Management Solution; all incident managers available on at least one of their emergency response devices. All join the conference call with the Fire Chief; the airport executive officer declares the Fire Chief Incident Manager, and adds the FAA, TSA, local police and fire departments to the incident response team. All incident managers receive detailed information from their respective work groups; the Executive Director and Fire Chief receive live video feeds from the meshed network connecting the incident location to the airport network. Communications between incident managers and their teams are instant, all voice, video, data communications are encrypted. Public Relations receive information from the Executive Officer and provides updates to news media.