Safety first for Durban airport from Spescom

Durban International airport is using advanced, automated telephony systems supplied by multi-national technology innovator Spescom DataFusion to deal with emergencies effectively.

The Emergency Notification System is an essential part of dealing with crises ranging from minor technical problems up to the highest alert level, such as emergency landings and bomb threats.

The system is just one of the Spescom technologies which the airport employs, according to Lorraine Jansen, regional manager for Spescom DataFusion in KwaZulu-Natal.

"For its safety-critical operations, Durban International uses the DataVoice Orion Professional voice recording solution," she says. "This provides the necessary backup archives to monitor the actions taken by staff and enable ongoing quality assurance.

"The Emergency Notification System (ENS) serves a related but markedly different purpose. Aircraft related emergencies are categorised into three phases. Phase one represents minor problems that affect operations and safety. Phase two covers the more serious issues that might disrupt or halt operations at the airport. Phase three, of course, covers the most serious incidents involving air traffic movements, airfield matters and passengers.

"At each of these phases, there is a predetermined list of people and emergency services that must be contacted without delay to deal with the problem, whether they are on the internal telephony system or only available through the public network. The system is an intelligent, automated dialler, which makes all the necessary calls at the push of a single button. It is programmed to use different contact numbers at different times of day and can also run through a set list of alternate numbers if it cannot connect."

Spescom has considerable experience with automated dialling systems of this type, such as the predictive dialling systems used in call centres. Whereas those applications increase productivity by saving the agents time, the airport ENS aims at improving safety by speeding up response to emergencies.

"This process, which could take 30 minutes or more using people to do the dialling, is carried out within a couple of minutes," says Jansen. "The system is configured to use up to eight lines simultaneously and there is capacity to increase the number of lines to 72 as and when business dictates the need.

"The airport ENS works off a pre-set database that contains all the phone numbers and the dialling rules for the different levels of emergency, times of day and groups of people to be contacted. It scales easily to handle more lines and it has the management tools for tracking and logging a full audit trail of calls made to enable analysis after the event. Obviously, this is a critical element of ensuring that emergency responses are monitored and improved."