Near the plane there is a gangway, the yellow thing is the luggage self-propelled mechanism, the red one is the fire truck, you can see the buses for passengers and the “tadpoles” for road trains, which at the same time can be tractors.
Figs where you will see what is happening inside the airport. This is because this is a place where there are a lot of jurisdictions at once: the police and dog handlers - federal, customs and border guards prefer to minimize any stories about themselves, baggage inspection is not a place for civilians, a wolf may be on the balance sheet in order to take pictures in the business lounge of international departures, one must leave Russia.
But it’s interesting! Once upon a time, Vadim talked about Vnukovo , and you asked to describe the services that the passenger does not see. In general, now we will go through some of them and generally look at how the airport of Kazan is arranged. He became the "Best Regional Airport in Russia and the CIS" five times in a row in the Skytrax ranking.
The first post was about control centers - ATM and PDSA (air traffic controllers and airport management). This is a post about the terminal and what is happening in it.
Since we looked at the equipment, we will start with the aerodrome service.
The work of the aerodrome service
The task is for everything to work. More precisely, first, so that everything is safe, and then - to work.
The day of the aerodrome service engineer begins with an interchange: this happens at 7:40 or 19:40, a shift of 12 hours. The changing engineer tells in words what is happening, shows a journal of the work done and comments (this is such an analogue of the console log). The approaching engineer looks at the state of the airfield, weather reports, schedule, statuses of people and equipment (how much and what is available). He has two jobs: in the control center and in the car. Actually, then he gets into the car and goes around the airfield to make a final assessment of the condition.
This thing can be a tractor unit or used to tow small aircraft
The function of an aerodrome service engineer is to manage people and equipment in such a way that the airport operates at a sufficient level of security and is effectively economical (that is, without downtime). For each typical action at the airport, there is a described process and standards, so the job is to prioritize, monitor the implementation of processes and solve unusual situations.
Each season has its own characteristics. In spring and autumn, birds teach their children to fly, hunt and migrate to and from warmer climes. Therefore, more attention should be paid to ensuring that flocks of birds and solitary gulls do not turn out to be on the air course. To do this, at airports around the world there are a variety of interesting things, including mass-dimensional models of birds made from the birds themselves. And disco balls. Ornithologists often watch with birds of prey: these birds devour and frighten peaceful birds, who are not aware of their danger to airplanes.
Photos from the airport archive
There are no biotechs in Kazan, only good old mechanics.
Bioacoustic installations are power, control unit and speakers.
Photos from the airport archive
The control unit also plays once a few minutes the very loud sounds of the panic of various peaceful birds. Samples go in a row, and sound like an old Kaspersky antivirus clinging to a folder with viruses. I don’t know how these sounds were recorded, but the birds are really bad there. Sort of like samples being bought. The problem with attitudes is the habituation of local birds. And other birds hear someone being killed, and can fly in to see what is left there, and whether it is possible to finish it. Most often, crows do this. Therefore, you need either something else for them, or traps with meat directly on bioacoustic. Cries of birds of prey can be used, but it is not very effective. Predators do not scream when attacking. If a predator screams, you can be sure that he is either very ill or very good (and he is busy with personal reproduction). But, nevertheless, such birdish “erotica” is sometimes used, because at least smart birds understand that there is a predator nearby. But to record a cry of panic for a particular species living in the airport is more effective.
The second common thing is the propane gun DBS-MC. They consist of a gas cylinder, a compressor and a device capable of producing a very loud sound, similar to a 120-dB gun shot.
Photos from the airport archive
There are stationary and by car. It is assumed that birds familiar with the danger of hunting fly away without looking back. Birds that were not hunted with a gun are simply afraid of a loud sound and also fly away. In fact, this is far from the case: local birds understand very quickly that this is just a sound, and it won’t do anything. Therefore, guns are good against migratory birds (unusual for them) - and they try to use them only where it is important, for example, on the side of the field that goes to the reservoir. The fewer guns installed, the less birds get used. Such a gun “shoots” according to the timer, by default this one is set once every 10 minutes.
For those birds who do not understand anything at all or are too accustomed to the two previous types of installations, there is pyrotechnics (a warning shot with a signal flare in the head always works) and mirror-image installations (imagine that flash blinks so hard in your eyes that it covers you, as with epilepsy). Birds are afraid of this and try to fly away. There are such installations along the runway.
Well, before the heap, a survey is carried out every three years - is it worth it, for example, to move the landfill another 5 kilometers, otherwise the birds can fly to the fresh grass of the airport to feed.
I would also talk about ornithology separately, but this will be a rather unpleasant topic for Russian airports in the coming year. Therefore, one day we will return to this topic, but for now return to the engineers of the aerodrome service.
Luggage mechanisms and sleeve for passengers in the background
So, the engineers are cleaning the strip (by the way, the new runway 3500 meters by 45 meters) from obstacles for aircraft. Speech is most often about snow, mud, ice and so on. Summer is the easiest season, the strip is almost always clean. But in winter everything is much more complicated: snow, ice formation is possible, and this greatly affects the strip.
Suppose that during a snowfall the strip was cleaned. Further, the snow continues to fall, and the strip begins to slowly change its qualities in the adhesion of the chassis to the surface. After some time, it will not be possible to put ships on it, and it will be necessary to clean it again. There is a clear boundary to a safe grip level, to which you can still land the board. It is measured by a special machine with equipment on the strip.
An engineer can get time (approximately because the weather is changing) between cleanings and organize a strip cleaning at the moment when there is a break between take-offs and landings. Or contact the air traffic controller and agree on the time for cleaning, free up the lane for the equipment to work. To do this, he needs to know how much and what kind of equipment will be, where and how it will go - this will work time. For example, he tells the dispatcher that he needs to give half an hour to clean the strip. The dispatcher says this to the commander of the arriving ship and asks him to go to the waiting area (in fact, cut circles above the airport much higher than the landing rates), or even send him to the alternate aerodrome.
Photos from the airport archive
When the dispatcher permits the departure of equipment, all this mass goes to clean. There are a lot of interesting things in the park. Usually there are 8 cars in the lane itself. On the strip itself - a thing with a plow, air gun and brush. A clean strip remains behind it, but snow drifts form on the sides. Therefore, screw rotors crawl behind it at the edges of the strip to throw snow even further (so that they don’t get back from the snowdrifts on the runway). Nearby there are special cars for cleaning signal lights. Behind them are sprayers of a liquid or granular reagent (so that the strip is at least for some time without ice). There are graders, bulldozers and tractors just in case. At the end is a machine that measures the coefficient of adhesion. Measurements are automatically transferred to the ATM controller.
With more or less large airports, with luck, you can find masterpieces of gloomy Russian genius: for example, in some places across the country there are tanks without towers (hauling planes after rolling out), you can meet the epic shaitan-shit almi-1 with a block of infrared lamps or TM-59 - “Gorynych’s Snake”, which is capable of cleaning the windows from windows when cleaning the village from snow.
But usually everything is much more prosaic. The last thing an engineering service needs is for stories and stories to form. 10 years without interesting memories is a good result. There were incidents in Kazan, but just a couple of times in the history of the airport. The opposite happens much more often: somewhere else, history happens, and Kazan acts as an alternate aerodrome, because the strip allows you to receive anything in the world from civilian equipment. And here is the largest fleet of vehicles from adjacent airports (now 56 units). The equipment is mainly Belarusian or Swiss.
Of course, if the technique passed, and then something immediately attacked it, then the strip could almost immediately become unusable again. If the process is slow, then there will be several take-offs and landings and the cleaning will be repeated. If there is a lot of equipment, and everything is done in one pass, and there are still the right reagents, the airport can operate in very difficult conditions. But sometimes there is such weather, when it immediately rains and the process of ice formation at temperatures near zero (when water still falls from above instead of snow or hail, and freezes from below). Then it is useless to clean: as soon as the technique passes, everything will freeze behind it again. Last year, for example, was a beautiful day when it was useless to touch the lane for about 5-6 hours.
All this equipment needs to be refueled, and here the gas station is right outside the airport gate within walking distance (this is not always the case in Russia, sometimes all this bunch of equipment creeps to the gas station quite far from the airport, which adds a level of complexity to logistics).
The situation on the runway is constantly transmitted by special messages. Pilots see data on the state of the strip both in preparation for departure and in the air.
The commercial efficiency of the airport depends on the accuracy of the ground services. In the sense that the strip is brought in any case to a guaranteed-safe state, but the time for which this is done depends on the coordination of work. Therefore, a lot of attention is paid to training before the season: engineers and drivers undergo training twice a year and regularly pass tests. First lectures, then examinations on procedures, then external examinations in the checking organizations.
Another engineering service is responsible for the condition of the strip in terms of design. It seemed to me in childhood that it was something unshakable, like monuments - they did it once and then you can not touch it for 50 years. In practice, this is concrete, and it turns out to behave rather unpredictably. Engineers look at chips, cracks, seams. There are planned works, but there are all sorts of chips and cracks that form vilely and spontaneously, without warning anyone in advance. The engineer sees them at a detour and sends the equipment and people to shut up everything (more precisely, inspection, troubleshooting, work plan, then the work itself). In Kazan, there are stocks in warehouses for cutting-filling joints and routine repair of concrete in general for a year. The task is to work so that the cracks do not become so that it was necessary to close the lane for work. Therefore, all problems must be crushed in the bud.
For IT automation, it was necessary to measure all procedures for different conditions and standardize all operations. It feels like it was a hell of a job - if you ever cleaned up the processes in a living organization, then multiply by 10 - but then they did it. More precisely, as my respondent Adele Gataullin says, they do it because they know their shortcomings and work to make things better.
What happens when a plane is landed?
It was already briefly in the last post about ATM and PDSA. The aircraft was brought “by the handle” to the allocated parking lot, examined, stairs, luggage mechanisms, refueling machines, ambulifts (if necessary) and other equipment came to him.
Let's see how it looks at one of the most interesting procedures - meeting the first flight. I was lucky and managed to see the arrival of the first flight from Budapest. This Wizz agreed with Kazan, and now there will be a regular message. Moreover, the first flight came with a load of 143 here and 173 passengers back to Hungary - this is a very, very decent result.
So, the plane is still somewhere far away in the air, but passengers are already arriving at check-in:
On the first flight, she is with balloons, a buffet table and a crowd of hungry journalists, so the passengers step aside and call their relatives: “Mom, they interviewed me!”
Girls in national costumes of the country are not included in ground support, but the airport may not be like this when many honored guests arrive, including the Consul General of Hungary.
Actually, here he is, voicing that this year for October, Schengen was issued at their visa center twice as much as last year:
You can register online and then print yourself a coupon on such things:
Blue Aeroflot assault rifle, there is a registration. Green S7, it changes the QR to a ticket. Black Airport, he does the same, but for any flight. Maintaining registration is very dreary and expensive, so you can register directly on the phone next to it (there is open Wi-Fi with SMS input), and it acts as a printer.
Passengers finish check-in around the time the plane arrives (it arrived a little earlier than the plan):
People in vests are employees of ground services. They examine him. In general, this inspection cannot be removed under normal circumstances, because border guards work there who are categorically against revealing their faces and procedures. But in this case, from this point on this flight is an exception. Then they start up the technique:
A tanker, baggage self-propelled guns and a fire truck are already standing behind the plane. A fire truck is needed for refueling with passengers on board (unloading passengers is also considered). There must be a fire extinguisher in the car, and then he drives up himself.
Wizz wants to unload passengers very quickly, so there are two gangways: front and rear. In Kazan there are many nearby parking lots from which you can walk to the terminal, and this is one of them.
But here's a super-procedure - passengers are put on the back of the bus:
Journalists lured the crew. It’s like the contact of civilizations in the feature film “DMB”, because they can’t go beyond the red line, and I can’t go behind it with the shooting.
Well, then passengers will be loaded onto the plane and after a bunch of checks (technical and organizational) he will fly to his base. The toilet, by the way, for acceleration, is drained only on the other side - just like board food and water. Yes, extra cargo and extra fuel, but speed is more important. A plane on earth is very expensive, in the commercial logic of Wizz - the maximum fleet must be in the air at any given time.
Where did the passengers leaving the plane go?
For passport control, baggage claim and customs. As I already announced, FIG you will see these operations. Then we meet passengers already outside the clean zone of the airport. The border in almost any country in the world at any airport can be distinguished by people with signs and fucked taxi drivers.
Therefore, it's time to talk about the terminal itself. This is how it looks:
Passengers immediately fall to a long "shopping arcade" - as in most civilized airports, tenants in this part of the hall are selected according to the needs of arrivals. Car rental, pharmacy and so on.
But first, the robot:
This shit waving a flag all the time, showing that there are a lot of IT people in Kazan.
Almost immediately, you can meet the second coveted thing - the charging point (and the frightened man behind her). There are several of them on the territory of the terminals, and one is just near the exit from the customs.
Of course the toilet. Here he is with the swaddling:
But another thing is amazing there (this is the toilet at the other exit). This white box from above says in a rather quiet voice right in your ear: "You are near the toilet." For those who do not understand - this is for people with disabilities who are oriented by touch and by ear. A tactile track leads to the floor, and critical places are voiced.
But if you had time to think in flight, you didn’t drain the phone and it’s good for you, then the first thing that catches your eye is still a tourist desk and a charming girl behind her (her reaction is better than that of a man behind a charger).
Kazan is the third tourist capital of Russia. They say that when Nizhny Novgorod was indignant at this and tried to challenge, cunning locals already filed a trademark for registration. There are a lot of sports facilities and famous teams, here was the Universiade - in general, always someone comes. Also, since this is Tatarstan, conferences are held here. The exhibition complex is right next to the airport (and there is still a hotel nearby).
The most common question is: “What terminal is this?” Because in the world of aviation there is a tradition of calling terminals as incomprehensibly as possible. In Rome, in the FCO, for example, there is terminal 1, terminal 3 - and there is no terminal 2. And their numbering was 1, AA and BC. Here in KZN there are two first terminals - 1 and 1A. New is 1A. It is simply called “A” in the advertisements so that passengers are not confused. And they are directly connected, and walk between them a minute, so there were no delays so far. The following questions from tourists - where and what in Kazan (tourists are handed a card in Russian or English), where to go (advised by the Kremlin), where to eat, what souvenirs to buy and where. All foreigners are keenly interested in the chak-chak (this is Tatar sweetness), and it is even at the airport in the souvenir shop - just in case you forgot it in the city.
You can still buy horse meat sausage (in principle, many Soviet sausages were with horse meat, and this is much tastier than sausages with kenguryatina from 2007-2008)
For some reason, Kazan cats, flags, skullcaps are dismantled. Once the plane was either bought by the Chinese or Koreans in the bud portraits of the president of Tatarstan. But more often our tourists come across, less often Germans, French. The Chinese are brought in organizedly in large groups, so they almost do not ask questions, but they drink all the hot water in the terminal. Well and still, if you are a foreigner, then before departure you can buy yourself warm clothes, in which it will be quite realistic to rake in another city:
All outlets, by the way, work around the clock. In addition to the Russian Post. Well this is mail. But in the afternoon you can send cards.
Connection with the city
An electric train runs from KZN to Kazan (it is called Aeroexpress here, but it is not the same carrier as Aeroexpress in Moscow, and the ticket is only 40 rubles in 28 minutes). The schedule, in fact, is “imprisoned” for Moscow aircraft. In general, the internal directions are primarily Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and the external ones are Antalya and Istanbul. Here is the railway station:
Parking near the airport:
20 minutes for free, then take 200 rubles per hour. There was a moment in Sheremetyevo that the 16th minute will cost you 1000 rubles, and I have repeatedly seen taxi drivers tragically fly in during traffic jams. And how they try to break through to the exit faster, increasing the traffic jam even more. Buses still go. A taxi to the center costs about 350-500 rubles.
In general, the usual cycle ends here. Someone flew, someone flew away. VIP passengers are routed through another terminal and according to other procedures:
So, what does it take to become the best regional airport five times in a row?
For me, the new terminal of Kazan looks like a Japanese station: everything is aesthetically pleasing, comfortable and very fast. It is rather at the level of interior design and sensations - in the old terminal it is not so, there is a Soviet arrangement of everything. But comfort is a so-so indicator for Skyrax. More precisely, they are evaluated by an expert commission and on the basis of "secret passengers", so he probably goes there, but not with a very large weight coefficient.
These things, probably, are included:
This photo exhibition is unlikely:
Separate garbage collection gives a plus point - everyone at the airports is drowning for environmental friendliness:
I asked just in case, whether this garbage is taken out separately, or if this is a usual training - it turned out they also take it away apart.
Restaurants - there are many, they are different, but the prices are not like in the city. This is not Japan yet:
What stands out is the mother and child’s room. Since 1979, it is very large. This is a place where one of the parents can go (dad is also suitable) to relax with the child. Most often this is a minimally equipped room with toys and water. But here everything is more interesting.
Firstly, a small kindergarten.
Secondly, a bedroom.
Thirdly, a refrigerator, a microwave, a thing for sterilizing bottles and other useful things.
All this is needed most often either when the charter is delayed (then passengers with children come to the room), or when someone is traveling from the region with a long transfer. You can sleep here (children's beds, adult chairs and sofas), or you can go to the hotel with a long delay. A room can be fully loaded with a delay of charters for 500 people - there are always many children there.
Most of all I was interested in the inscription “Smartavia” on the children's drawing of a pot-bellied airplane:
I found the prototype of this airplane on the playground in the common area (there are soft walls and a small touch labyrinth):
But this is where the inscription came from, and it’s “Smartavia” and not “ Nordavia ”is a mystery. And where did the machine gun go - too.
Since we are in Tatarstan, there is a dedicated prayer room.
I suggest: if you are an atheist, then prayer rooms are the best places at almost any airport to sleep for a couple of hours and take a shower.
Now we need to talk about the Marshal.More precisely, the official position is called the “Terminal Service Manager,” but in abbreviated form - that’s it. The fact is that the problem with the staff at any complex facility is that each service must do its job. To get this better, in fact, macro scripts are made for all typical actions. That is, each operation is studied, disassembled and reassembled in an optimal way, and then the resulting course of action becomes the basis of the process. Consequence - you can work efficiently, making each employee a human script. But a strange reaction may follow any non-standard question or situation. Because to teach all exceptions is difficult, and it requires much longer and more expensive training, and immediately raises the requirements for people.
The second problem (already known to you) is work at the junction of services, when you need to quickly decide who does what and distribute tasks, rather than wait until two or three specialists transfer responsibility, covering their ass.
That is why they introduced the post of exception handler - Marshal. This is a person who solves all the problems of passengers at the airport. A year ago, they selected the best specialists from those who interact with passengers and put marshals.
The rights of the passenger hang in an understandable form right at the racks. Cool!
Did you argue at the check-in with an airline employee or is he epically stupid? Call Marshal. Grandmother doesn’t know how to get to Moscow? Marshal’s name, she is escorted to the gate. Need help? Well, you already know who to call. The marshal can put a late passenger without baggage on his flight, quickly passing through all the controls (in conjunction with a representative, if he gives the go-ahead, and yes, I suggest that this is an optional procedure). In general, any airport employee, from a cleaning lady to a security guard, knows that if a passenger wants something non-standard, they should not send it, but call the marshal.
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The morning begins with a picture of the day: where are which flights, where is the denser departure or arrival. This is important, because sometimes you need to move the movers or agree on something with agents. Next, you need to collect statuses on breakdowns and pass them to engineers. If this is a lamp replacement, then they usually know it themselves, but all sorts of things like a stopped tape at the check-in or something else that affects the speed of passage of passengers - all this needs to be prioritized. Because the engineers proceed from their SLA and the convenience of the route at the airport, and the marshal can change this order in the direction of eliminating the bottleneck for passengers. Then, in fact, patrolling your territory. Queue control is important: sometimes you need to open a new rack, but more often - redirect people who do not see neighboring open ones. Sometimes you need to help passengers with luggage,who flew to another city. On some flights there are baggage breaks, also a separate handling. Bring people from terminal 1A to 1 (part of services like the lost property office in another terminal).
Applications for escorting a disabled person also come to the marshal. You need to organize escort, a narrow stroller (to fit into the aisle of the aircraft), ambulift (this is something like a ladder, only a lift for the stroller). Ambulifts at the airport are two pieces, by the way. When boarding through the sleeve, they try to spend it directly with ordinary passengers, and when boarding through the bus, they are on ambulift.
Favorite situations - disputes about luggage or hand luggage. But, it seems, the moments when this caused a storm of misunderstanding of citizens have already passed. Let me remind you, this story is connected with the fact that tickets became more expensive, and the purchasing power of the population fell or did not increase. Demand for aviation began to decrease dramatically, and then almost everything “superfluous” was thrown out of tickets (exchanges-returns-baggage-carry-on-call-center-registration) and the designer suggested “collect yourself a normal fare yourself” with a bunch of options, as it was already accepted in Europe.
And further.If suddenly it seems to you that check-in always ends 40 minutes before departure, then be aware that the same Flydubai or Turkish can do this in an hour. Mary asked to say that.
About the transportation of animals must be warned. Each airline has its own rules from very strict to quite humane. It is usually easy to transport a service dog or companion animal (by the way, it may depend on the company not only a cat, dog, hedgehog or guinea pig, but also a snake or beehive - although it is almost impossible with insects in the Russian Federation). Well, heavy dogs definitely need to be put in luggage in a special cage. In Kazan, cows, horses and chickens were transported, but on cargo flights. The coolest thing was when transporting animals for the new zoo from Prague. Next, we need veterinary control (these are the federals, they, like, for example, the police or the ATM, do not belong to the airport, but work in it).
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A small problem so far with the title of the post is something incomprehensible with us, and neither the word “Marshal” nor “terminal dispatcher” explain why it is impossible to continue to call on the shift supervisor, the Russian consul and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What else do you need to become the best airport?Quickly check people for security barriers (yes), make good navigation (everything is simple, navigation is determined by architecture), grow (2.62 million passengers in 2017, and 3.14 million in 2018, this year it will be about 3.4 , looks like). Have telescopic ramps (4 pieces, two for domestic, two for international departures), a normal medical service (here it’s cool, but next time about it), good communication with the city (there is, and even a train station through the covered passage), a hotel nearby ( there), a large parking lot (800 places for cars and 50 bus), a barrier-free environment (there is) plus bonuses - a prayer room, a mother and child’s room, playgrounds, business rooms, free phones for calls around the world (yes, there are) .The airport can accept any heavy aircraft (signaling equipment and the length of the strip even allow you to take the A380 and An-225 "Mriya"). Good ERP minimizes service bugs. Coupons are printed at the airport. There is a mobile application. On departure, you can buy horse meat or souvenirs. There is a connection with the expocenter directly with a warm transition. Many air carriers are accepted. It is necessary to comply with all engineering standards such as triple and quadruple power redundancy. This, of course, is not the limit and the best-in-the-world-airport, but of the regional ones, yes. And KZN employees travel to other cities to share their experience in preparing for the influx of guests - because before the Universiade they went through this in practice.On departure, you can buy horse meat or souvenirs. There is a connection with the expocenter directly with a warm transition. Many air carriers are accepted. It is necessary to comply with all engineering standards such as triple and quadruple power redundancy. This, of course, is not the limit and the best-in-the-world-airport, but of the regional ones, yes. And KZN employees travel to other cities to share their experience in preparing for the influx of guests - because before the Universiade they went through this in practice.On departure, you can buy horse meat or souvenirs. There is a connection with the expocenter directly with a warm transition. Many air carriers are accepted. It is necessary to comply with all engineering standards such as triple and quadruple power redundancy. This, of course, is not the limit and the best-in-the-world-airport, but of the regional ones, yes. And KZN employees travel to other cities to share their experience in preparing for the influx of guests - because before the Universiade they went through this in practice.And KZN employees travel to other cities to share their experience in preparing for the influx of guests - because before the Universiade they went through this in practice.And KZN employees travel to other cities to share their experience in preparing for the influx of guests - because before the Universiade they went through this in practice.
Adele Gataullin and representatives of services were with us at the airport. Photo from the airport archive.
In our hub Tutu.ru you can read a bunch more about transport.