Honolulu International Airport

As a vastly popular tourist destination and a main international hub, Honolulu can see over 21 million passengers a year through its 80 plus gates. That means that it has stringent and specific communication needs to make sure customers have the best experience possible. At the project’s beginning, Honolulu’s International Airport had a legacy IED paging system. And along with updating the announcement and paging objectives – in six different languages – IED was tasked with providing and integrating the Gate Information Display System (GIDS) and Baggage Information Display System (BIDS) with new Multi-user Flight Information Display (MUFIDS) and a Gate Management System (GMS). Airport-wide visual paging was also required to be integrated with the aural paging to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

With five flexible 510ACS mainframes, redundant servers for reliability, and IED’s customized Enterprise software, the challenges of the Honolulu airport were easily overcome. To integrate the various systems, IED provided the first airport-wide Ethernet network. This Gigabit network is fully monitored by IED Support Services in Louisville by using a Fluke OptiView Integrated Network Analyzer. The IED Flight Announcement System was enhanced to provide multi-departure flight announcements from the heavily used commuter gates that board multiple flights simultaneously. Nearly 250 LCD displays were added for dedicated information from multitask gate and flight information to courtesy paging. A total of fifty-one TCAS Courtesy Announcement Workstations were installed, including one at every gate hold room so gate agents can create and manage formatted courtesy and ad hoc announcements for local or airport-wide audio and visual paging. Flight and courtesy announcements were all provided in multiple languages including English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese for Hawaii’s diverse passenger groups.