Shannon Airport is one of the Republic of Ireland’s three primary airports. It is the third busiest airport in the Republic of Ireland with more than 3 million passengers per year.
Shannon Airport is one of the Republic of Ireland’s three primary airports. It is the third busiest airport in the Republic of Ireland with more than 3 million passengers per year.
Shannon Airport had an outdated analog video surveillance solution which had to be upgraded to a full IP digital solution in order to make it more available to key airport services and staff including the police, fire services, baggage handling and Customs & Excise. Each group needed to access the system for different reasons at different places and all at the same time.
The new system had to be highly flexible and capable of growing with the airport. It also needed to deliver significant cost savings and organizational benefits.
Re-use of existing camera hardware and much of the Airport’s existing cabling infrastructure were key to keeping installation and hardware costs down.
The airport required very high performance in the new system including the ability to capture live images at state of the art resolution. It also required a user-friendly interface for all staff to view, playback and operate the system.
Shannon Airport is located on the western-most part of Ireland and is considered to be the gateway between Europe and the Americas. It handles approximately 3 million people a year, and nearly 50,000 metric tons of freight gets transported through its cargo area. The facility is enormous, with 40 check-in desks, 5 baggage carousels and 14 boarding gates (including 6 air bridges). There are nearly 40 aircraft parking stands. The car-parks can hold more than 5,000 cars.
John Francis, the security manager at Shannon Airport, faces myriad challenges, and he tackled the terminal first.
We used a cutting edge 360-degree camera to cover the boarding gates in the large, congested area used by low-cost airlines. The main reason for surveillance here is health and safety. “We’re looking for slips and trips,” says Mr. Francis.
We used a second 360 in the arrivals area, which houses vending machines, ATM’s, car-hire desks and pay stations for the car park.
“The PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom camera) was always looking the wrong way when something happened, and was sometimes left zoomed in by an operator,” Mr. Francis said. “This is never the case with the 360; we see everything.”
Shannon required total situational awareness for this location, but it had to be discrete and customized while the costs had to be as low as possible. With the 360-degree cameras customers like Shannon Airport save money by reducing camera counts for any location. The technology allows for retrospection, which means that owners can go back to any event and go inside an image to find a person or an incident because the camera gives them 24/7/365 situational awareness, and the de-warping software makes an image taken with a fisheye lens smooth and readily discernible.
Product Adopted:Transportation