ULD on Rails – An Underground Airport Magic!

One of the most exciting news from the aviation world last week related to the expansion of Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC) in Dubai was the announcement of a plan to have an underground railway network for transporting passengers across Terminals. This will enable high speed movement of passengers at the airport thereby saving precious travel time and facilitate on-time departure better.

Many times, changes such as these get limited to what a passenger see at the forefront. Operations behind the scenes get omitted or parked for future which may or may not become a reality.

Being in Airport Operations in the current assignment, news of underground train for passengers, got my colleagues and I thinking on a parallel business case for ground handling. If an extremely complex operations such as passenger movement can be facilitated underground, what is stopping an airport planned at the scale of DWC from thinking of ULD transportation in a similar manner to take bags, cargo and other products across the length and breadth of the airport?

DWC is already speaking of passenger volumes of 260 million making it 2.5 times more than the busiest airport in the entire world at present, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. When you operate at such high volumes, you need to have an automated and extremely agile design for both passengers and rest of the products that need transportation at an airport.  

Unit Load Device (ULD) refers to the container in which a ground handler carries bags, cargo and other products such as courier, aircraft spares etc. for an airline and delivered to the aircraft awaiting departure and vice versa. Most of the airports as we know today have this operation handled as an activity above the ground. There are certain exceptions such as Dubai International Airport (DXB) where bags are transported underground through a high-speed baggage handling system which is a smart and intelligent automated installation which takes the bags to its right destination.

Like the automated baggage movement, the idea is to have ULDs filled with these bags or cargo or other products travel below the ground, programmed to reach the destination intended. If it is for a departing flight, the ULDs reach the bay just in time where an aircraft is parked and injected up to the ground level so that these units can be loaded safely.

What could be even better is if the automation can be extended to have these ULDs loaded without the help of manual intervention. The concept of Robotics as we speak has developed enough to make this a reality. The reverse feed applies to an arrival aircraft where the ULDs are automatically unloaded and injected down to an unmanned programmed transport mechanism whereby it heads to the intended baggage carrousels or cargo warehouse depending on the product loaded in the units.

The whole idea may sound colossal but is something we could think only at the time an initial design of an airport is getting sketched. Nothing suits the bill better than DWC which aspires to be the most automated airport in the world. The benefits are numerous. The busiest airports in the world today itself require hundreds of equipment operators driving tractors across the airport to transport bags and cargo to and from the aircrafts. Imagine taking this entire traffic below the ground sans the drivers and tractors. It is a benefit straight away to decongest the otherwise busy operations on ground in a highly optimized manner with zero dependency on people thereby eliminating manual intervention.

An airport being a finite area with clearly defined boundaries and locations for bays and other operational areas, designing this should really be feasible. Combine this with automated underground passenger transport, we are looking at efficiencies reaching heights never before seen, making large scale airport operations seemingly simple.

Here is an earnest wish from a passionate aviation enthusiast, bestowing full power to the airports of the future where people will happily hang out doing what they love and spending to their heart’s content instead of wondering when they will move forward while waiting in the queue!