Sudipta Dev – Mumbai
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Technology plays a very important role in an airport for optimising capacity, improving speed and the volume with which passengers can go through the airport, and enhancing their service experience. Innovative technology implementations at Dubai International as well as Dubai World Central – Al Maktoum International is enabling the same. Dubai International Airport that has a growing network of 140 international airlines connecting 260 destinations, will be the number one airport in the world by 2015 in terms of international passenger traffic. Recently Dubai Airports has launched a service measurement system which records and reports every queuing times at various key points at the airport so that those at the control centre can have a visibility on where the heavy queues are and can dispatch resources to reduce those queues. It helps with the decision making process at the control centre.
“At Dubai Airports, obviously technology plays a very important role now today, and will increasingly do so in the future. Based on the fact that the growth capacity is a big issue for us, we’ve implemented a number of things to help speed people through,” said Lorne Riley, head of corporate communications, marketing and corporate communications, Dubai Airports. For instance, an automatic tray return security machine, which increases throughput at each security checkpoint by 70 per cent, almost doubling the speed. Dubai immigration has implemented Smart Gates, which is a system that uses a machine readable passport, coupled with a biometric that will allow reduction in transaction time considerably. An individual has to register with the system – an iris scan, with machine readable passport and the next time he/ she presents the passport at the reader and the camera matches with the biometric of the iris, if there are no issues, the gates will automatically open. Currently this is for residents, citizens of GCC countries but eventually it will be for the 32 nationalities that have visa on arrival.
Interesting technology implementations at Al Maktoum International include interactive virtual assistants and information zones. “The next big thing is at Al Maktoum International, what we hope to do there is completely change the paradigm of how airports are organised and how they work so that the legacy problems of today can be got rid of by a customer-centric approach in the new airport. Our master plan is currently being reviewed and should be announced in the first quarter and that would embrace some new ideas and new thinking on airports,” mentioned Riley.
