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The Las Vegas airport has more than recouped its investment in common-use equipment, leading the way for other U.S. airports to eliminate proprietary airline systems that track flights, passengers and baggage By David Joachim
It was a nightmarish time for the five-person IT crew at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. For a day and a half back in 1995, the token-ring network went dark. Managers didn't know what was on their calendars and couldn't check e-mail. Many workers were forced to declare a computer holiday.
Randall Walker, then the new assistant director of the airport, wanted answers. "I was livid," he recalls. "I found out it was just some Mickey Mouse piece of equipment [IT cheaped out on, and I remember saying to the guy who was in charge, `If you ever try to save me money again, I will fire you. That $1,000 you saved me just cost me tens of thousands of dollars in productivity.'"
The message was clear: Information was as important to airport operations as terminals and runways, and Walker was going to give IT the resources to keep the place running smoothly.
Nearly a decade later, Walker runs McCarran, the 11 th busiest airport in the nation, as director of aviation for Clark County. He's as bullish as ever about technology, so much so that he has taken control of all the frontend systems that present information about flights, passengers and personnel throughout the airport. His staff runs just about every system in the complex, from the flight-information displays to the baggage-tag printers, an approach rarely found in U.S. airports.
And he's not finished yet. Next, McCarran plans to deploy self-service kiosks that a passenger can use to check into any flight, at the airport or at a nearby hotel. He's also upgrading to a Gigabit Ethernet backbone network to ramp up wireless and multimedia applications, a move that might not have been possible had McCarran not taken central control of IT.
Love-Hate Relationship
Walker's IT-driven philosophy has drawn praise from other airport directors and ire from airline executives unaccustomed to relinquishing so much control.
When Walker and his team first called a meeting in 1996 to discuss setting up common-use terminal equipment, or CUTE, throughout the airport...