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Posted on Tue, Dec. 27, 2005
By DANIEL C. BARTEL
Special to the Star-Telegram
You might call it anatomy of an airport.
Engineers at TransSolutions see from above what airport passengers and
administrators standing at eye level cannot.
Belinda Hargrove, managing partner at TransSolutions in Fort Worth, has
principal oversight. She stares intently at the computer screen as tiny
digital dots thread through passenger check-in lines and baggage loops
around conveyor belts.
Her job is to find and unclog areas of congestion. Finding the source
is the easy part. The challenge is alleviating congestion long-term,
not just during peak times.
"No one builds a church to accommodate peak times around Christmas
and Easter," she said. "Our solutions handle more than just
the day before Thanksgiving."
TransSolutions engineers feed the numbers into the design software and
get a computer simulation of 3-D passengers parking their cars, wheeling
their luggage around. Everything in the computer model is based on real
data. Designers can take blueprints of a proposed new terminal and plug
in virtual passengers and baggage to test the terminal's ability to handle
traffic loads.
That way, airports can modify their designs before any concrete is poured.
TransSolutions' reputation has grown steadily since Hargrove founded
the company in 1998. The company has consulted for airports in nearly
every major U.S. city and in Europe and Asia. In 2000, Dallas/Fort Worth
Airport hired TransSolutions to analyze designs for its new $2.8 billion
international terminal. TransSolutions analyzed the terminal's parking,
curbside check-in and flow of departing and arrival passenger and baggage
handling.
Airport consulting is a good business but not without its peaks and valleys,
Hargrove said. Work is obviously more brisk when the airline industry
is doing well. Nonetheless, the airport consultants are usually well-regarded
in good and bad times.
"The type of work we do is so specialized, an airport doesn't have
the budget to hire staff to do full time what we do," she said.
Hargrove started in airport consulting nearly a decade before she formed
TransSolutions. In 1988, she started with American Airlines Decision
Technologies, then part of AMR Corp. Decision branched off from AMR in
1997 to form Sabre Airline Solutions, owned by Sabre Holdings Corp. Sabre,
based in Southlake, also owns the online travel service Travelocity.
TransSolutions now employs a staff of 20 and has more than $3 million
in revenue annually.
Things have become a lot more interesting for Hargrove lately.
In November she was named chairwoman of the Airport Consulting Council,
an international trade association that represents consulting firms involved
in the development of airports and related services. The council is based
in the Washington, D.C., area and comprises about 240 companies.
As chairwoman, Hargrove will oversee those companies' interaction with
airports and government entities. Most of the companies are highly specialized,
consulting in areas such as the environment, architecture and runway
pavement, said Paula Hochstetler, president of Airport Consulting.
More and more, consultants are focusing on long-range planning.
Hargrove is in talks with government officials. Seven government offices,
including the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, the Commerce Department
and the Transportation Security Administration, have formed the Joint
Planning and Development Office to discuss issues facing airports 20
or 30 years in the future, when most could triple their capacity.
For now, the office is brainstorming ways to process passengers and baggage,
though a major topic has been security screening. Laws governing airport
security continue to be a challenge because they're still so new and
constantly evolving, Hochstetler said.
Certainly, finding new ways to process passengers is top priority. Planners
even draw from ideas already in practice, Hochstetler said. Some airports
in Thailand use "in-town" check-in, in which passengers, in
advance of their flight, drop off their baggage at a curbside station
for delivery to an airport later.
Down the road, some designers envision a "tunnel of truth," Hargrove
said, which moves passengers single file along a conveyor system scanned
by infrared devices.
The concept is a little too futuristic for now, she said. But it illustrates
some of the ideas that airports are using to keep things moving.
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