Cairo International Airport recently opened its massive new passenger facility, Terminal 3, equipped with 14 advanced airport systems from US-based Arinc, a communications and engineering solutions provider.

Designed to handle a maximum of 14 million passengers a year, Cairo Terminal 3 is the new home of 27 international and domestic airlines carrying 11,000 passengers each day on some 200 scheduled flights.

State-of-the-art systems at Cairo Terminal 3 include the Arinc-installed world’s first context-aware operational platform to control all employee access to critical ramp control and management applications.

Employees are linked only to those IT applications they actually require, according to their profile, work assignment, type of electronic access, and location. This ensures the appropriate and secure exchange of passenger information, flight information, catering orders, security prescriptions, maintenance tools, and more.

Arinc has provided Terminal 3 with Egypt’s first custom biometric immigration gate (BIG) system, to streamline border control processing and reduce long security queues.

When qualified passengers use the automated biometric gates, Cairo Airport police can focus more attention on the manual screening of sensitive passengers, a major benefit to frequent travelers and a competitive advantage for airlines.

Terminal 3 is equipped with the first self-service CUSS passenger kiosks in the Middle East, an Arinc SelfServTM kiosk system.

All the Arinc IT systems at Terminal 3 were installed by, and are being maintained by Arinc, using local resources that have undergone comprehensive training.

“Arinc is proud to have partnered with CAC’s planners, architects, and prime contractors since we were awarded this responsibility in 2006,” stated Paul Hickox, director of Middle East airport systems, Arinc EMEA.

“We have taken this opportunity to deliver a suite of airport operational systems precisely matched to the vision of our customer that are unmatched anywhere else in the world. We greatly appreciate the cooperation we have received on every level, which ultimately made this accomplishment possible.”

In addition to supplying its specially-developed IT systems for Terminal 3, Arinc has deployed ten of its industry-standard operational technologies at the new terminal.

These include the iMUSETM common-use passenger check-in and departure system; the IP-enabled AirVUETM flight information display system (FIDS); AirDBTM airport operational database (AODB); and LocalCheckTM local DCS for airlines without host connections.

Terminal 3 also uses the Arinc AirPlanTM resource management system, information broker (IB) system, and Arinc information kiosks.

Arinc supplied the network connectivity for the new IT systems, including local area network (LAN), network management, and Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies.

This is the backbone switch for all data flowing across the airport and the heart of the IT systems integration. It will eventually be extended to include terminals 1 and 2 and cargo facilities.

The network also provides connectivity to host systems for all airlines that use T3, in addition to critical aeronautical fixed telecommunications network (AFTN) messages.

These provide vital information for aircraft operations such as distress messages, urgency messages, flight safety messages, meteorological messages, flight regularity messages and aeronautical administrative messages. – TradeArabia News Service