Optimize Budget and Schedule with Infrastructure Mapping

When the pandemic shuttered air travel for most people, it came on the heels of 11 years of profitability for airlines and annual passenger growth rates of more than 4 percent. According to a 2019 report released by the Federal Aviation Administration, domestic revenue passenger miles were expected to continue growing through 2040 at an annual rate of 2.3 percent, while international Revenue Passenger Mile (RPM) would grow 3 percent annually.

While analysts projected at the start of the pandemic that such traffic would not come back for a few years, early indications with the rising rates of vaccinations are that pent-up demand may bring pre-pandemic domestic travel levels back faster than predicted.

Thus, the strain on domestic airports will rise again with that returning traffic.  According to the Airport Consultants Council, the average age of U.S. airports is more than 40 years old. With rapidly changing technology, even younger airports can be out of date for the needs of travelers and carriers. Studies have shown that delays at airports and avoided trips because of poor airport infrastructure cost the economy upwards of $35 billion per year, as reported by the U.S. Travel Association. 

The past several years have seen an emphasis on airport improvements, with projects at major hubs exceeding $50 billion since 2018. Calls for more than $20 billion have been included in current federal infrastructure budgets to improve the nation’s airports.

Among the nation’s thousands of private and public airports, renovation is inevitable, as they prove to face fewer public and zoning obstacles compared to new construction projects. The challenge is that for such aging facilities working with demolition-and-renovation projects can prove difficult, especially in older terminals where a consolidated set of as-builts are not available.

One wrong cut of an existing communication cable could prove costly, affecting operational aspects such as security, flight information, and baggage services.

Cable documentation is rarely at the forefront of most project planning, yet it often proves to be the most cumbersome to design around. Liability often makes contractors apprehensive about cutting cables, while overtime for fixing wrongly cut cables can prove expensive for a continuously operating facility.

However, proper cable identification can both avoid accidental downtime that impacts customer experiences and provide the project team the information it needs to do its job unimpeded. Understanding and planning for cable infrastructure relocation costs before contractors arrive helps build an accurate budget from the start and mitigates any surprises in the project schedule.

The State of Cable Infrastructure

By code, most communication cables must have markings. These markings provide information such as manufacturer, part number, date of manufacturing, and distance markers.

The challenge is that older cables may be lacking this information, either because it was not provided when installed or those markings were lost through time. Markings also can be damaged through installation, such as pulling a cable through a pipe, creating friction that rubs off the marking.

Unlike electrical cables that can be easy to cut, diverted and rerouted, communication cables require a knowledge of what processes they are supporting in order to plan for their cutting and relocation. It is not always possible or feasible to cut cables where they would ideally be rerouted, especially if doing so would necessitate a splice or multiple splices.  A splice is another point of failure and it is not desirable. New communication cables are typically run, instead of cutting and splicing. Also, if the cables are operational, the allowable downtime could be just bare minutes, so new cables will have to be run because there would not be enough time to cut and splice.

Communication cables also are made of two different materials: copper and fiber optic. With copper cables, processes supported tend to be singular. Cutting a copper cable might cause a monitor to go down, but it will not take down a whole system. Because copper cables could potentially be spliced, they are much easier to move.

Fiber cables reduce the number of cables to manage, but they do that by facilitating multiple systems on a single cable. Cutting these cables potentially can grind business to a halt as systems go offline, whether they are phone lines, fire alarm, public address systems, or alarms monitoring security doors.

Methodical Task Worth Investment

Understanding and planning for cable infrastructure relocation before construction begins not only builds proper understanding of the scope of work, but that knowledge translates to building a proper budget. Most aviation projects are design-build or CM-at-risk that requires contractor engagement early in the project. Comprehensive cable documentation enables contractors to bid on the actual work not just time and materials, and avoid any surprises.

The process begins by looking at cable jacket colors and narrowing down each cable's function. The date of manufacture and cable footage markers along with part numbers can help identify end points and therefore the cable purposes.

Following the cable to its termination point and cross referencing the cables there with the observations made when visually examining the cables is critical. Cables are marked at the conflict points, and then the documentation process moves to the end points.

Once cables are identified and marked, critical processes can be protected from accidental damage. Cables that cannot be identified are left until everything else has been documented and determined, narrowing the function by process of elimination. Separating airline-specific cables from those supporting the airport authority or government agency also can help build a usable map of all the communications cabling.

Right Job for the Right Team

Due diligence in cable documentation is vital to providing accurate information to the contractors so they can properly sequence the workflow. This helps to solve the concern of liability, as most contractors will not start cutting cables until they know what is connected to them.

A cabling documentation consultant also alleviates the burden often placed on stretched IT departments and facility managers to identify cable functions. These in-house teams often become the de facto documentation specialists feeding contractors the vital information when they are unable to do the work. With an outside trained expert, the in-house teams can focus on the daily demands, only acting as advisors when their long-time institutional knowledge is needed for answers that are not obvious.

While on the surface a third-party documentation team seems an added expense, for facilities that have both continuous and just-in-time operations, the expense can be a cost savings when compared to the alternatives. An outage of malfunction in a security system could force TSA to delay or re-screen all passengers on an airside, delaying flights. In addition to the added costs, such scenarios also become a public relations issue for airport management.

While obvious, airports are unique in their challenges for the multiple, concurrent systems that are supported. In certain areas, particularly those that have been in action for many years, a significant amount of cables can exist that need mapping and documentation, where many of those cables could be abandoned, but they were never removed.  In new facilities you don’t have to deal with significant layers of abandoned cables, so the process might be simpler.

Successfully determining what is on a cable gives airport operators both knowledge and power to efficiently manage their demolition and renovation projects. The hours spent identifying cables as well as implementing any fixes necessary to reroute cables keeps the project on schedule and on budget and provides managers a map to efficiently execute future projects.

At a time when there is a clearer understanding of how vital our transportation infrastructure is to day-to-day life, mapping the cabling infrastructure is a significant step in making sure our airport infrastructure is up to date and fully functioning as it undergoes much needed improvements.

Santiago Beron, RCDD, CTS-D, is Principal with TLC Engineering Solutions.