London Luton - airside safety team deliver a safe environment more effectively

Executive Summary
London Luton Airport Operations Limited (LLAOL) retained ClickAirport to help the airside safety team deliver a safe environment more effectively. The programme of work was seen as an investment in people, through focussing on the people and process primarily, and using the technology to grow the ownership of, and interest in, safety processes by the airside safety officers. After successfully focussing on systems that enable the team to spend more time on bird control and less time on repetitive paperwork logs, LLAOL continued their relationship with ClickAirport to extend the benefits to Bird Strike reporting, Accident and Incident reporting, Aerodrome Inspections and Turnaround Checks.

Background
LLAOL is one of the UK's fastest growing airports with passenger numbers of 7.5 million during the calendar year 2004, an increase of 400% in 10 years. In January 2005 TBI plc was taken over by a joint venture including Aena Internacional of Spain. Aena Internacional is the international business arm of Aena, the Spanish national airport and air traffic control organisation that owns and operates 47 airports across the Iberian Peninsula with some 155m passengers using its airports. Aena also has operations in Central and Southern America. UK Government forecasts suggest that there is the demand to justify expansion of Luton to handle 30mppa in the period up to 2030.

LLAOL's management team need to ensure they optimise the effectiveness of the front line mobile teams. Andy Harrison, Operations Director of LLAOL, said “We found that a lot of our people spend time very inefficiently completing lots of repetitive and formal paperwork. We had to ask ourselves, what’s the value of the effort, and what’s the value we retrieved from the paperwork. With ClickAirport, we realised that actually of course, our people preferred to spend their time doing the things they like doing, which compared to the paperwork, are things related to the safety of the aerodrome.”

Solution
LLAOL do not seek to solve challenges with technology initially and ClickAirport embraced the people and process side to ensure the technology was appropriate. Initially, the implementation employed mobile computers to capture data about wildlife hazards and control activities. Reports are made available through a secure login to an Operations Portal online. The system, implemented by the airport team with ClickAirport, allows everyone in the decision-making process more immediate access to information. The system went live in 2003 and is complemented by services to ensure it best supports the front line team and management alike. The specific items recorded on the mobile computer are the operator details (PIN access), bird patrols (start/ finish), bird counts (species/ quantity), location (map based), when (atomic clock), dispersal technique, success factors, pyrotechnics used, shotgun cartridges used, culls, vehicle mileage, diurnal cycle and weather conditions.

Results
For the front line teams, the time spent doing paperwork in the office has been practically reduced to nil and there has been a reinvigoration of the bird control duties. Hugh Workman, one of the airside safety officers, explained “In addition to our time being used more effectively, sometimes the paperwork didn’t go round to the offices for a couple or three days because we were busy elsewhere. Other people would need to spend days and days making sense of our logs.” In commenting on ClickAirport’s management of change, Hugh added “I thought it would be difficult to use because I’m not computer minded. I also thought here we go- complications, big brother… but it’s nothing like that. It’s simple, easy to use, efficient, you can see what other vehicles and colleagues are doing- just accessing the information, it’s easy.”

Andy Harrison explained what the information means to the management team, ”Today, safety management is about analysing and assessing the information which you’re taking in and basing your decisions on that information such that you can say where risks are proven to be increasing or you’re not reducing your risks adequately. With ClickAirport, you can see that- it becomes self evident, and you can use that information to support initiatives, whether they are development, investment or training initiatives. That information is visible and available to you as an Operations Manager.”

In terms of the deployment programme Andy Harrison said “What we want most from a supplier is one that listens to what we have to say and come up with solutions based on the challenges that we’re trying to deal with. ClickAirport has met, surpassed in fact, our expectations in the sense that they came to us with an open book, they sat and they listened and they kept refining the solution by listening to what our staff have to say on an ongoing basis. That really was a huge shift, particularly from our staff, in terms of their contribution to the introduction of a product.”

Conclusion
Not only have the benefits been successfully extended to how LLAOL reports bird strikes, accidents and incident, aerodrome inspections and aircraft turnarounds, but the techniques used by ClickAirport are being rolled into other technology deployments. The final word goes to Andy Harrison “This relates to how we, as management, interact with our staff. The introduction of this technology as helped us as an organisation to understand the role our staff have to play. It’s given us invaluable information, they feel now they’re a part of this process, it’s given them ownership of the product, but more importantly it’s given them ownership of the responsibilities that we have in the airside environment. As an organisation, that’s of huge value to us and we’ve learnt that there have been ways in which we have previously introduced products that need to change and particularly we would like to use this, the ClickAirport introduction, as a model way of introducing new processes and technology into the organisation.”