Why Las Vegas didn't gamble on airport gate management
In a community where every flight means more hotel rooms filled, keeping airport gates busy is no game of chance. That's why McCarran uses Ascent's SmartAirport® gate manager.
There are many ways to gamble in Las Vegas—but one thing you probably won't want to bet against when you come here is whether your airplane will find an open gate waiting when it lands. The people that run this community have run some numbers. What they've found is a direct correlation between the number of incoming flights and the number of hotel rooms filled—and filled hotel rooms, of course, translate to millions of dollars spent on everything from restaurants to theme attractions to gambling. That's why, when it comes to keeping the airport gates open for business, Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport does things a little differently. Two years ago, it took over ramp control from the FAA and installed common use terminal equipment throughout the facility. And, more recently, it installed the Ascent SmartAirport gate-management software system. The result: any airline can load and unload passengers from any gate. Combine that flexibility with the power of the Ascent software to plan maximum gate utilization—and what you get is virtually a sure thing: a lot more people visiting Las Vegas.
“There is a very significant difference between McCarran and other U.S. airports,” states Howard V. Kourik, Jr., McCarran International Airport's Information Systems Manager. “The airport can assign any ticket counter or any gate to any airline that does business at the airport. That's why we decided to install Ascent's SmartAirport gate-management solution and why we have common use terminal equipment. To the Las Vegas economy, air passenger traffic is like water. And gate management is the faucet.”
Kourik adds that the idea is not to move airlines around unnecessarily, but rather to use gates that would otherwise be empty. “We're not moving United, say, from gate 3 to gate 5 and back again on a regular basis. Basically, the airlines have their normal operating locations, and they have what are known as preferentially leased gates—they don't own the gates but get first shot at them. And so the airlines have all their equipment on the outside, the baggage carts, the mobile bag belts that go up into the plane and take the bags off, the refueling equipment, and so on. You obviously can't bounce the airlines all around the airport without disrupting their operations, and that's not what we are trying to do.”
But, thanks to Ascent, what the airport can do is assign gates to other airlines during those hours when the preferred airline is not using the gates anyway. “Suppose, for example, an airline calls us up and says they want to start service to Las Vegas. The Ascent gate-management system lets us see if we have empty gates available during the hours of operation they have requested.” But the ability to assign any gate to any aircraft depends on something else too—ramp control authority. Unlike other U.S. airports, in Las Vegas that authority resides with the airport, not the airlines. It is both by helping the airport assign gates in advance, and then helping ramp controllers respond quickly to last minute changes, where Ascent enables the airport to derive maximum value from its gates.
Split-second decisions
The main reason McCarran chose Ascent, Kourik says, is because of its artificial intelligence capabilities. “You build scenarios—and those scenarios are based on schedules that the airlines said last week they were going to operate next week. So, okay, the actual day of operation arrives. The schedule is fixed in concrete at this point, and we are going to run that schedule. But, of course, things happen—like mechanical delays on a plane as it is leaving the gate, or an extra plane shows up that no one knew anything about. When situations fall outside the anticipated scenario, Ascent is able to update the plan much faster and much more reliably than humans can manually.”
Kourik describes a typical situation that a ramp controller might have to manage: “Suppose our controllers know there is a plane about to land, and it will be going to gate 22, and they also know there is a plane getting ready to take off that is parked at gate 23. They know that if that plane starts pushing back from the gate and unhooking and so forth that it is going to take 10 minutes to clear the gate area. But, the plane that is landing will only take a minute to reach the gate, which will be blocked by the plane backing out. So we are going to direct the plane that is getting ready to push back to hold until the plane coming in is parked at its gate. Ramp controllers must deal with situations like this hundreds of times a day.”
“We hire only ex-FAA personnel for all our ramp control positions,” says Paul Strybing, McCarran's Airport Communications Control Manager. “Their experience is vital. Ramp controllers must deal with the same kind of pressures as those working in the air traffic control towers. The job involves split second decisions about where planes should go and which plane should go first. One misstep can set off a chain reaction of delays.”
Keeping those ramps active is a high priority. There are, it turns out, few other options for bringing more people to Las Vegas. The highways are overloaded, and the airport, which used to sit out in the desert, is now surrounded by development. There will be no more runways built at McCarran beside the two sets of parallel runways that already exist. “Our runways have more capacity to handle planes than our terminals have capacity to fill those planes with passengers,” Kourik says. “That's why we're building another terminal, and we're building more gates at the terminals we already have. It's also why we want to use those gates to their maximum capacity now.”
In June, McCarran added two wings of D gates, or 26 additional, bringing the total at the airport up to 97. Two additional D wings are planned, which will eventually add up to 20 more gates. Also in the works: a new international terminal slated to open in 2006 or 2007, adding six domestic gates and eight international swing gates. When asked if McCarran plans to extend the Ascent solution to these other gates too, Kourik replies: “Absolutely!”
According to Strybing, the Ascent system helps ramp controllers faced with a complex situation more quickly decide where to direct planes moving back and forth on the tarmac. “The system makes its recommendation, but then it is up to the controller whether to follow that advice, which they pretty much always do. The system is able to evaluate a lot more variables a lot more rapidly than we can. There are so only so many details a human can remember, like the fact that someone else has already assigned a gate to a late-arriving flight. But the Ascent system remembers.”
Recommendations are made based on rules embedded in the Ascent database, states Gerald Ryser, McCarran's Ramp Control Supervisor Vice Director. Some of these rules might be as follows:
- At gates 1, 2, and 3, you may park a 747 at gate 2 only if the plane parked at gates 1 and 3 is a 727.
- If you have a 767 at gate 1 and a 737 at gate 3, you may fit a 757 or 737 at gate 2.
- These are gates that America West typically uses.
“Suppose you are faced with a situation where all the gates are full,” Ryser says. “And an airline puts on another flight which the station manager here knows nothing about, and out of a clear blue sky this plane shows up. Well, that is when the ramp controller can go into the Ascent system and say, `Suggest a good gate to assign this plane—and, by the way, it is an America West 737.' The system looks at the existing plan, it looks at the rules, and it looks at the fact that this is an America West 737, and it makes a suggestion. The plane may still have to wait for a gate, but the system can identify for us a gate that will result in the minimum wait before the plane is allowed to pull into a gate.”
Integrated information flow
Better, faster gate assignments and higher gate utilization means more passengers are able to move in and out of McCarran, but only if passengers and airline personnel are kept in sync with the most up-to-date gate information. That's another way Ascent's SmartAirport gate-management solution streamlines passenger flow—by integrating the flow of information.
Once a gate assignment is made (or changed), that fact has to be communicated to the traveling public in the terminal so they will know where to meet the plane. It also must be communicated to the airline so it will know where to park the plane and where to assign ramp and gate personnel. In the past, such communication would be done manually. The airport would tell the airline where to park the plane, and an airline employee would type the gate and arrival or departure information into the FIDS (Flight Information Display System). That information would then be displayed on the airline's airport monitors to notify both the public and the gate and ramp personnel assigned to service the flight. In other U.S. airports, this information comes from the airline, which is responsible for making its own gate assignments, not the airport. Either way, however, manual data entry causes a delay between the time when the airline knows where a plane will be parked and when that information is displayed on FIDS monitors. Worse, the displayed information might not even be accurate due to data entry mistakes.
Here's how McCarran solved that problem when it installed Ascent—by making the Ascent solution a single point of contact for all gate assignments. As soon as a ramp controller makes a gate assignment, that information is communicated to the FIDS, which at McCarran is driven off a common database of flight information shared by all the airlines. Airport monitors display information for all flights, not just for whichever airline happens to be assigned to the particular section of the terminal where a monitor might be located. That means that information is always complete, accurate, and up-to-date. Everyone—public, gate personnel, ramp personnel, the airline, and ramp controllers—always knows which flights will be parked at which gates. Moreover, the flow of information is bi-directional. As soon as an airline enters a schedule change into the FIDS, the scenario-building modules inside the Ascent software can project how that change will impact gate assignments. Ramp controllers are immediately alerted to the impending change, and also advised of what appropriate action they should take.
Says Kourik, “It's part of our mission to improve service to the passenger, to ensure passengers have the most accurate information possible so that if there are delays or changes in schedules occur, it is easier for them to deal with those changes because they are better informed.” Kourik notes that in the past the airlines might not have been eager to have the most accurate information displayed on public monitors. But with the new system, airplanes spend less time on the ground, which means the airlines make more money, so the airlines are enthusiastically buying in. Three airlines, in fact, have installed automated feeds between the airport's flights information system and their own internal networks, so that McCarran's gate-management decisions are instantly available everywhere those airlines use gate information, including their public web sites. The three airlines are United, American, and Southwest.
In order to achieve that level of integration, one of the items high on Kourik's list of selection criteria for gate-management software was the openness of the product's database, which is used to store decision rules, gate assignments, schedules, and other information.
“We wanted it to be Oracle based,” Kourik observes. “We wanted the supplier to give us an open database and tell us what was in it so we could easily integrate their data into our system and vice versa. Every time we wanted to do something, we didn't want to hear, `That will be $125,000 for our programmers to do that', so our specification was very clear about wanting an open system, which means Oracle in so far as that is the industry's de facto standard.”
The FAA's role
So how did McCarran get into the ramp control business? Given all the potential benefits—in higher airline revenue, improved airport efficiency, and greater passenger satisfaction—one could easily assume that ramp control was the airport's idea, especially given the importance of passenger volume on the local economy. Actually, it was the FAA's. Prior to 1999, the FAA performed ramp control at McCarran—and at most major U.S. airports—directing planes not only in the sky and on the taxiways, but right up to the gates as well. This would be a role the airport had never taken on before, and one for which it was not sure it was prepared to assume. That's when the airport became interested in automated gate-management solutions, so that it could turn into a real business opportunity what might have otherwise been just one more task the airport had to shoulder.
“The FAA prompted us,” says Kourik. “The FAA has got its hands full, controlling planes taking off and landing and keeping track of them on the taxiways. And it has always been an ancillary function to control the planes all the way to the gate, and they've been doing that because no one else was available to do it. Finally, the FAA said, `Look airports; this really is not part of our charter. We need you to take care of that from now on.' What makes us different at McCarran is that we said, `Okay, FAA, if you're not going to do ramp control, we will, and we will do it for all the airlines.' Now we can assign any gate to any airline at any time. And, thanks to Ascent, we can exploit that flexibility to the fullest.”
“The new arrangement is also safer,” Strybing says. “Allowing us to do this means the FAA controllers can focus on the active runways and taxiways. There's less distraction and therefore less likelihood of an accident.”
Safety is also a primary factor in the decision of where to park a plane. Assigning two large planes to adjacent gates can mean catastrophe, Kourik says. The planes' wings can smash into each other, which is why type of aircraft, and which types of aircraft can park next to each other at which gates, are some of the most important rules in the Ascent database. “Accidents are much more likely to happen when humans are overloaded in a rapidly changing situation,” Kourik says. “With the Ascent system, we are much less likely to overlook something. That is just too high a risk.”
Then again, this is Las Vegas—a place where risk is something the locals tend to take very seriously. It is also a community that has figured out the connection between efficient flow of passengers through its airport and the health of the local economy. In a time of rapidly rising airport congestion and limitations on airport expansion, that's a lesson other communities may well want to consider. ises either. At Toronto Pearson, that's the ultimate scenario.
