Airports are the most intense transport links of all with, for example, London Heathrow having its busiest day just over a year ago with nearly 260,000 passengers writes Doug Hart, chairman, Hart Door Systems.
Drilling further down into Heathrow’s statistics there were 78.0 million passengers last year, the cargo volume was 1.70 million metric tonnes and of the four terminals, Terminal 5 moved nearly 32 million passengers on over 213,000 flights.
Heathrow is clearly at the top of the statistics scale but it’s a close run thing when compared with King Abdulaziz International Airport (KAIA), Jeddah, which was opened in 1981, and which could become the largest airport in the world for passenger numbers during the annual Hajj it would be one of the busiest airports in the World.
The connection between these two airports and over 40 other international airports is Hart’s airports range of specialist doors which are focused on baggage management on conveyors, fire security and high speed access controls for vehicles, baggage and people.
There are two entirely separate areas in airports – passenger side and air side – both require fire, security and access with significant systems control interface as demanded by increasing need for security and fire protection.
As a result of the increasing need for automated, high security and fire separation, individually or collectively Hart developed operating systems to be able to consider integration of doors into the building security and management systems along with standards compliance.
Using these allows zones to be secured from intruders, delivering attack, threat and fire-spread prevention as well as safety for the public and even contributing to an airport’s environmental strategy through the doors’ energy saving qualities.
Hart has solutions for baggage conveyor systems incorporating doors that provide security, frequent action, with high speed options that prevent smoke and fire spreading again helping airports with their green foot-print by saving energy. This unique level of product specialism for airports comes from a policy to drive door systems development and product testing that ensures the systems produced by Hart are practical and work as specified.
At King Abdulaziz Airport Hart completed its largest airports order by delivering 177 fire and security shutters for its new baggage conveyor system. Specifically two-hour fire seals were provided on openings in the Terminal’s firewalls. Further as the baggage conveyors passed through the firewall openings it was necessary to seal above the conveyors and also from underneath and the sides to prevent fire penetration. These implications required Hart to complete a further fire test of a completed assembly to UL standards, a world first.
Conveyor doors, by their very nature, are small doors however many examples of much larger doors have been completed for instance an 11m wide door at Gatwick duty free area and 16 No. 8m wide fire doors to Baghdad airport’s Babylon terminal which demonstrate the potential size range involved.
Recent contracts include Bergen Airport where Hart supplied high speed fabric doors to the baggage handling areas together with security shutters to internal areas. The baggage handling doors were supplied individually as complete assemblies pre-wired on self-supporting frames which were bolted into place on site and plugged in on site, ready to operate with necessary interface connections to conveyors etc. This method saves lots of time on site providing a very efficient installation.
Other Hart current projects meanwhile, Gatwick is replacing all conveyor doors on terminals north and south. Heathrow terminal 2 following a review of security and reliability is upgrading to a hart design to all their check in doors. Returning to my original comment about ‘control’ in airport security and safety, both are paramount and door systems play an integral part in achieving this.
Working with key international players in the Airport conveyor market Hart has invested considerably in conforming with all relevant British and American standards to focus on the global sector. This unique level of product specialism for airports comes from a policy to drive door systems development and product testing that ensures the systems produced by Hart are practical and work as specified.
