Our role involved providing airport facilities planning and civil, structural, mechanical and electrical engineering design.
The North Satellite Concourse incorporates 10 aircraft stands specifically for narrow bodied planes serving the short haul market. It enables the airport to maintain its service pledge of embarking and disembarking more than 90% of its passengers via air bridges, providing a weather-tight indoor environment. The project was completed to time and budget.
A key challenge involved fitting the 10 new stands into the space available. Taxi lanes on three sides made space tight. It was impossible to follow conventional stand design and park planes perpendicular to the building.
The concourse building itself presented challenges: remote from the terminal, it needed its own supplies of conditioned air, fire services and low voltage electricity. Working in a busy airside location with heavy demand on aircraft stands called for careful control of construction risks.
Value and benefits
- To accommodate the required 10 stands, we parked planes at an angle only 3.5m from the concourse building. A bespoke ‘switch-back’ fixed link bridge design was developed to provide an acceptable ramp gradient within the very limited space available.
- Due to the remote and constrained site location of the concourse building, plant and AHU’s were accommodated in a roof top ‘pod’. Because air traffic control requires clear sightlines across the airport, height restrictions were imposed on the building. Rooflines were sculpted to shave it in under the sloping height limit.
- The North Satellite Concourse matches the architectural, performance and sustainability standards set by T1.
- We controlled risk through comprehensive ground investigation and by using advanced 3D design for services and structural clash analysis. The model was also used for construction planning.