In the last 30 years there has been a five-fold increase in air travel with half the population flying at least once a year and many flying far more often than that.

The UK economy depends on air travel with many businesses, in both manufacturing and service industries, relying on it. Visitors by air are crucial to UK tourism.

Air freight has doubled in the last 10 years with one third by value of all goods we export going by air. There are 200,000 people employed in the aviation industry, with three times as many jobs supported by it indirectly.

So while there is recognition of the need to develop airport capacity, the challenge is to deal with the pressures caused by the increasing need to travel whilst at the same time meeting a commitment to protect the environment in which we live.

In December 2003 the government published its White Paper, 'The Future of Air Transport' which sets out a strategic framework for the balanced development of airport capacity in the United Kingdom over the next 30 years. Despite environmental concerns about expansion the White Paper came out in favour of two additional runways in the South East over the next three decades, the first to be at Stansted by 2011.

Governments don't build airports or add runways: that is down to those who own and operate Britain's airports. Any proposals will still have to go through the planning process in the normal way. In the South East this falls to the BAA.

Building a Surface Access Management System

In 1999, BAA PLC commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory to design a bespoke product to help them make better sense of the data available for the analysis of Surface Access to their airports in the South East. The System known as SAMS (Surface Access Management System) was GIS based and used visualisations to help in planning/monitoring and trend analysis. It was very successful and in 2002, the BAA won a transportation award for innovation.

Following on from this, BAA commissioned Aligned Assets, a GIS consultancy to take their system to the next level. Aligned Assets worked closely with BAA to deliver SAMS II replacing the existing desktop version with an easy-to-use web based solution using MapInfo's MapXtreme and ESBI's GeoXplorer. All data is now held on a central server using MapInfo's SpatialWare for MS SQL Server. The user interface is rendered within Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

Key to the design brief was to produce an application for use by transport planners or general management NOT GIS Professionals in order to promote use, improve functionality and keep training and support to a minimum. A SAMS user group was also set up amongst the users at BAA's three airports in the South East: Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. By regular engagement with the users, Aligned Assets were able to refine and tune the system to meet specific user requirements and make the most of the available data.

Nicola Hooper, Head of Transportation Policy for BAA takes up the story. "The system had to be very useable so that anyone with a working knowledge of Windows could immediately get to grips with the application with the minimum of training. We wanted to be able to visualise the data in what are relatively complex scenarios and data analyses in a number of different ways. Making the data meaningful and simple to interpret gave us a very powerful communications tool so that when we were taking our proposals to airport executives we could convey the complex issues in fairly simplistic and understandable presentations".

The SAMS II system gathers data from a variety of sources, which are presented in a common database structure so that comparisons can be made. These include:

• CAA Air Passenger Data
• Employment Survey Data
• ID Centre Data
• Digitised bus routes for Heathrow and Stansted
• Car Share Data
• Travelcard Data
• Noise Contours and air quality monitoring points

The system has been used for a variety of key tasks including the appraisal of transport initiatives, surface access strategies, car parking strategy and perhaps most importantly as a tool to help secure BAA's licence to grow as Nicola Hooper explains.

The system focuses on Surface Access and the environment including:

• Public transport modal share
• Rail
• Heathrow Connect
• Crossrail & Airtrack
• Regional coaching strategy
• Road capacity/demand management
• On-airport car parking limits
• Environment
• Air quality
• Air noise

Other environmental strategies include visual impact, biodiversity, water environment, waste management and energy.

"SAMS was the first real system as far as we were aware to dovetail all the different facets of transport planning together. It also opened our eyes to its use in other functional areas within the BAA and that it had scope to evolve and morph into a much more generic business application. We used it quite intensively in our application to grow Stansted Airport to 25m passengers per annum by 2011, which was very successful in that it received local determination by Attlesford District Council.

SAMS was also used extensively in the development of proposals for Heathrow Terminal 5, which is scheduled to open in March 2008. Terminal 5 comprises a core terminal building and first satellite in phase 1, with a second satellite to follow by 2011, which will deliver 60 new aircraft stands and incorporate a public transport interchange built into the design. But alongside the permission to build Terminal 5, came a raft of planning conditions and commitments that required much better analysis of the surface access dimensions, not only through construction but also in managing future demands for example construction workers, car parking cap etc.

SAMS has proved the concept of an easy to use low support application that can be used by our strategy specialists, to help in the development of BAA's transport strategies with minimal training. It is now used to assess our investment in transport schemes and initiatives, and to study comparative year on year trends. It has been a very useful tool that can provide the whole picture, for example looking at the effect on air quality following investment in a transport corridor," continued Nicola Hooper.

SAMS has improved targeting of public transport investment by BAA in areas of low activity but potentially high demand. It has helped identify market opportunities for improved rail services to BAA's airports in the South East. It has improved the monitoring of performance against targets in transport strategies through consistent benchmarking of performance and has supported the development of successful airport surface access strategies & company travel plans as well as facilitated economic development in neighbouring Local Authority areas

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The success of SAMS has prompted a review of GIS within BAA. Moving to an Oracle solution and utilising its spatial functions for networking and time series analysis, for example; comparing passenger growth over the years and seeing if use of sustainable transportation systems is improving. Since data is at the core of the system it will seek to use the latest census data and incorporate the latest demographic data from the neighbouring local authorities.

About BAA

BAA own and operate 7 airports in the UK, which serve over 700 destinations around the world. BAA airports handled 117 million international passengers during the 12 months up to October 2005 and 1,700 aircraft every day.

BAA provides over 1 million m² of commercial accommodation for more than 900 retail organisations at its airports and is one of the largest commercial landlords in the UK.

One of the UK's principal developers of infrastructure and one of the construction industry's largest clients, BAA financed and built the £500 million Heathrow Express rail link from Heathrow to London Paddington.