London City Airport

1 / Introduction

London City Airport’s Master Plan sets out a major growth and development plans through to 2030. It was developed in response to the Government’s Aviation White Paper, ‘The Future of Air Transport’, which requires specified airport operators to outline their vision for growth up to 2030.

Buro Happold crowd and baggage flow consultancy team were invited by London City Airport to support the design and operations team on the stage C and stage D of passenger flow modelling for the proposed Terminal Development Project. The scope of works covers modelling the passenger flows within the reconfigured Terminal and proposed expansion elements – principally the new departures and arrivals areas.

Working closely with the operations and security teams at LCA, our people movement specialists carried out detailed assessments of transport related parameters such as modal splits and rail expansion plans, design parameters such as number of automatic check-in stations, operational parameters such as immigration staffing, as well as security parameters. Our work enabled optimisation of the locations, orientations and numbers of CUSS kiosks, as well as the immigration desks, baggage hall and central search facilities.

Comprehensive data capture surveys of the existing operations informed the study which involves a detailed dynamic micro-simulation of arrivals and departure scenarios for the 2010 and 2030 operations of the terminal. A combination of static network models and detailed dynamic simulations were carried out to perform sensitivity analysis of the parameters on terminal performance.

A significant contribution from our consultancy team was a collaborative work with UK Border Agency and LCA on the implementation of the Single Line of Intervention. The work involved a trial and survey at London City Airport to guide the feasibility testing through a series of what-if and sensitivity analysis of the impact of moving immigration desks on queues and densities in the baggage hall.

Key facts

  • Optimisation of locations
  • Comprehensive data capture

Related Disciplines

The Project Details

Client: London City Airport

Architect: Allies and Morrison Architects

Buro Happold services: Passenger flow consultancy, baggage handling and structural engineering

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