As the only commercial airport in Qatar, Doha International Airport (DIA) is experiencing a phenomenal increase in traffic, due mainly to the expansion of the national carrier Qatar Airways. Latest available yearly figures showed that DIA served nearly 15 million passengers and dealt with 360,000 tons of cargo. This involved more than 117,000 aircraft movements and, pending the opening of a new $5 billion airport in 2011, DIA has built new facilities to meet the demand. DIA's single runway is 4,500m making it one of the longest civil runways in the world. Keeping that runway operational, efficient and safe is a crucial business requirement.
Hazardous debris
The runway at DIA covers an area approximately the size of 45 football fields. Visually inspecting such a vast area from a moving vehicle can be challenging. With passenger numbers increasing, the number of arrivals and departures between each inspection are growing rapidly. The team at Doha were aware of the potential safety risk, as seen in its most extreme in the Paris Concorde crash in 2000, believed to have been caused by a piece of titanium debris on the runway.
To help reduce the risk of such incidents, DIA have invested in Tarsier, the world's first automatic FOD detection system from the Airport Technologies team at QinetiQ. Tarsier has already been installed at a number of airports across the world, including Dubai, Heathrow and Vancouver and DIA were keen to join this industry-leading group.
Constant detection
Tarsier is a fully automatic runway inspection system which supplements standard visual inspections by remotely monitoring runways around the clock without interruption to aircraft movement.
It uses networked high frequency and high resolution radar to sweep the runway every minute. Items as small as a suitcase wheel or metal bolt can be located to within a metre and their GPS co-ordinates transmitted to a central user display. To enable rapid retrieval, the co-ordinates can then be downloaded to handheld GPS units, which display the debris location on an airfield map.
Successful tests
Gordon Brown, Project Manager at QinetiQ, said: "Our specialists ran detailed computer simulations at DIA, which showed that even with the extreme length of the runway, only three radar towers were required. Design had to allow for a new taxiway to be built and to take account of a large restricted area utilised by the Qatar Emiri Air Force."
Commissioning and testing also presented challenges due to constant use of the runway but QinetiQ's installation team and DIA air traffic controllers devised a plan which saw the full length of the runway covered with test targets over three afternoons. Tarsier came through with flying colours and DIA's own radar engineers have now been given training in the operation and maintenance of the system.
In its first few weeks of operation, Tarsier has already detected a number of potentially hazardous FOD items at DIA, including two small pieces of concrete which, whilst only one or two centimetres in size, could cause serious damage if ingested into an engine.
Akbar Al Baker, chief executive officer at Qatar Airways, said: "We see Tarsier as an integral part of our safety management system because it inspects the runway continuously with no disruption to aircraft movements, this will bring us both cost and operational benefits but more importantly, is a commitment to have an airport operation which is fully safety driven."
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