When Airports Utilize Smart Technology and IoT to Advance Health and Safety Measures Throughout the Airport, it’s a Game-Changer

Airports across the country partner with Flagship Aviation Services (Flagship) to provide janitorial, custodial, maintenance and integrated facilities maintenance services throughout their airport. Flagship helps them present a clean, safe, and disinfected environment to their passengers and tenants.

While COVID-19 presented many challenges to airports, some airports took time to innovate and add new amenities to make the airport easier to navigate and extremely sanitary. When passenger traffic slowed, it provided airports with the time and manpower to implement advanced health and safety measures, including distancing markers, touchless boarding pass scanners, plastic shields, hand sanitizing stations, and rapid onsite testing.

Now that passenger counts are returning to pre-pandemic levels, maintaining advanced health and safety measures has become more of a challenge. However, since the threat of COVID-19’s viral spread continues with Delta and other variants, it has become imperative for airports to monitor and regulate their extended measures so that manpower can be strategically redistributed throughout the airport.

“From day one, the health and safety of our passengers, guests and employees has been our top priority,” said an airport CEO. “We have worked tirelessly over the past year to make our guests feel safe when they decide to resume flying.”

The Challenge

When the pandemic first began, airports increased hygiene measures to help keep passengers and employees safe.

However, as vaccines became readily available across the U.S. in 2021, the number of people who wanted to fly again began to increase.

In response to the growing number of passengers, airports wanted clearer monitoring of facility work, cleaning frequencies, and ensure their extended measures were proving successful.

The Solution

Some of the technology available includes:

• Throughput Counters – count the number of passengers that enter and exit an area – for example, the airport restrooms
• Badges & Beacons – monitor when employees begin and end their restroom cleaning tasks and provide automatic reporting of the data to Flagship Intuition* or an airport’s CMMS
• Dashboard Access – provides real-time data and analytics from the throughput counters and monitors janitorial services performed for specific areas
• System Reporting – gives Flagship and their client airports the ability to generate reports based on the real-time data and analytics collected

The Benefits

The TRAX technology has helped Flagship produce greater visibility into passenger trends, peak times of use, personnel saturation, and total cleaning time.

Flagship uses the information to ensure cleaning frequency requirements are being executed. It also allows Flagship to redistribute personnel quickly when there is a last-minute gate change, or an early or delayed flight.

Flagship and their airport clients are also able to ensure that the airport has the correct number of personnel on duty during peak and slow times. This ensures service delivery is efficient and applied in areas that have the most critical impact.

Even though traveler traffic has not yet recovered fully to pre-pandemic numbers, the TRAX Smart Restroom System is able to support current airport operations now and will become even more valuable as passenger counts increase.

The technology can be a real game-changer for airports by helping them have greater visibility into their cleaning and disinfection processes, building trust with occupants and increasing passenger satisfaction.

“The entire Flagship team has been instrumental in making [our airport] one of the safest airports in the world,” said an airport Vice President of Facilities. “Their focus on the details helps to ensure a satisfying and safe experience for the customers and tenants.”