airtraffic

Author Topic: Lost luggage, canceled flights: Opening a new airport terminal is risky business  (Read 2669 times)

Offline KB4TEZ

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Neat idea !!!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/lost-luggage-canceled-flights-opening-a-new-airport-terminal-is-risky-business/ar-BBTePMT

Last month, more than 200 "fake" passengers showed up at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. 

They weren’t working a scam. And they weren’t there to protest anything.

Instead, they were volunteering to help Sea-Tac test the operational readiness of a satellite terminal undergoing its first major expansion and modernization in 45 years.Opening day for the first phase of Sea-Tac's expanded North Satellite Terminal was less than two weeks away. The bathrooms, drinking fountains, food concessions and visual paging systems weren’t quite ready, but this “passenger-flow simulation” was testing the journey between the main terminal and the expanded satellite as well as the process of boarding and deplaning a flight at one of the new gates.

“We’ll also be asking the volunteers if the temperature in the terminal is comfortable and if they can hear the overhead announcements clearly,” said Charles Goedken, Sea-Tac’s senior manager for operational readiness, activation and transition – or ORAT, which is the system of best practices many airports use to make sure a new terminal is ready for opening day.

“What you try to do is to start working early with the planning and construction team so that when the airport or the facility is open everyone knows what to do,” said Lance Lyttle, the managing director of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. “You don’t want to find issues on opening day; you want to find them before opening day.”