American Airlines

American Airlines are one of the largest carriers operating out of London Heathrow Airport with 20 inbound and outbound flights daily; that’s more than 5,000 passengers every day. In addition to their passenger services; in partnership with Worldwide Flight Services they run a large cargo operation.

The business must function to exacting time constraints; the rapid and efficient turn-a-round of their aircraft, ensuring that they do not miss calculated take-off times is vital; failure to do so, incurs significant financial penalties.

American Airlines has eleven dedicated teams working closely together to achieve optimum operational efficiency in the challenging environment that is London Heathrow Airport, particularly ‘Ramp’ operations. They require a solution that provides instant, clear communications, that is robust, reliable and cost effective. In 2015 on behalf of Heathrow Airport Ltd (HAL) Radiocoms Systems Ltd installed a Hytera DMR Tier III Digital Trunked System, which uses a ‘Distributed Antenna System’ to provide coverage across the airfield and throughout all the terminals.

Our proposal to American Airlines was to migrate onto this system and we facilitated several trials with the variety of hand portable models that are available for use on the system. After extensive testing American Airlines decided to choose the Hytera PD605 hand portable radio for their Baggage Handling Team and for the rest the Hytera PD685 hand portable. The former required a radio with less features for simple voice communications and the latter required the more feature rich PD685, where ‘Private Calling’ and ‘Text Messaging’ could be utilised. Both these radios have a higher rated speaker and proved to be suitable for operating in the particularly noisy ramp environment.

In addition, they chose the Hytera MD785 Desktop mobile for their static office locations and later this year they will be introducing a new corporate VOIP communications network, where they will be integrating into it several additional MD785 mobiles.

In total American Airlines has 115 x Hytera PD685 hand portables; 22 x Hytera PD605 hand portables and 8 x MD785 desktop mobiles.