How Gatwick Airport gets 95 per cent of travellers through security in five minutes

And from curb to plane in 30 minutes

Gatwick Airport, one of Europe's busiest airports, claims that it can get 95 per cent of its 42 million passengers through security and immigration control in just five minutes.

Chris Howell, head of business systems at the airport, suggests that a combination of sensors and analytics software, and using them to allocate human resources, is key. "Our target is 95 per cent of passengers through [security] in five minutes," says Howell.

Coming from retail - a veteran of Tesco, Dixons and Marks & Spencer - Howell suggests that there is no such thing as 'digital exhaust'. "You walk away from [retail] thinking that all data is business data - it just looks like a log file.

"Therefore, you come at these problems and use these technologies with a slightly different lens than you do when you're coming through just from technology, security and IT ops perspective," he says.

One of the key challenges for Gatwick is that, unlike most other major international airports, it only has one runway - yet handles as many or more passengers as airports with two, three and even four runways.

Howell was speaking at Splunk's recent .conf2016 user conference in Orlando, Florida.

One of the first steps that needed to be taken was to monitor flows of people through the airport, by taking a variety of different sensor and other data so that operations staff can reasonably predict volumes of passengers at different parts of the airport.

"There's quite a lot of data at airports. We have a huge number of physical sensors - the lighting, the HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning], the retail point-of-sale systems, the Wi-Fi, the check-in, the baggage and all of the SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems, and all of the solutions that we monitor," says Howell.

"Most of the stuff to do with us is in the middle layer, which is what we call operational management and systems control. That's the sweet spot for us in terms of how we take the data, put it together and empower our operational colleagues to deliver the seamless customer journey from kerb to gate."

That 'journey' at security starts at the electronic turnstiles that read passengers' boarding cards to ensure that they are, indeed, at the right airport on the right day, and that their boarding card is valid.

"If you're an international passenger we want you through in three seconds, so three-to-five seconds for scanning and walking through. If you're flying domestically, then it's between five and eight seconds because we take a photo of your face and iris with the biometric sensors for security reasons," he says.

That alone is not a straightforward task.

"You've got the software at the gate, the biometric software, the software that's validating whether you're at the right terminal, the right airport on the right date to let you through the gate. You've got an enterprise service bus. So you've got four or five links in the chain."

If the process is slower than expected here then queues will quickly form, and once queues start forming, says Howell, it's particularly difficult to dissipate them. That's why monitoring is so important, so that staff can quickly be allocated to particular areas - or sent off on their breaks early if it is quiet and likely to remain quiet.

Rather than invite a variety of different software companies to tender, Howell says that he conferred with colleagues, ex-colleagues and others before inviting Splunk to provide a proof-of-value.

At security, the airport expects passengers to require an average of 1.2 trays each - a target that's facing upward pressure from the numbers that carry laptops and other electronic items that require a separate tray to go through the airport's x-ray machines.

However, Howell knows that each 'lane' through security needs to process 750 passengers per hour in order to hit the airport's targets.

One the other side, says Howell, airlines are challenged to 'rotate' their aircraft within 30 minutes so that they can use the same aircraft on short-haul routes three or four times a day. "When a plane comes in to land we're trying to get everyone to act like a Formula-1 pit crew to get the passengers off, the plane cleaned up, and passengers on," says Howell.

All have access to the same data, and the dashboards also show how each of the ground crews and airlines are doing relative to each other, too, to provide both guidance, as well as to introduce an element of competition.

"That's up on the screens in our operations centre, both out on the airfield and on the eighth floor where our chief operating officer sits. We make it freely available to all of the airlines and the ground handlers because, with the data in their hands, everyone does better and we can all focus on the passenger experience rather than arguing about whose fault it was that a plane was one or two minutes behind the target."

Finally, in a move that was perhaps one of the keys to getting the project not just taken seriously in the boardroom, but used there every day, Howell made sure that the dashboards could be formatted to fit comfortably on the CEO's Apple Watch.