May/June 2023 - 20

SECURITY
AUTHOR Justin Young
How to Address Competing
Audio Needs at Airports
Prioritizing emergency announcements while
balancing the importance of other announcements.
requirements that make each airport
unique. It could be how to access their
FIDS or legacy audio systems that
need to remain in use, loudspeaker
preferences, or many other details.
When every installation is intrinsically
unique, it becomes imperative
to understand the " why " of many
requirements to make the best system
recommendations.
Managing
Emergency announcements must take precedence in message prioritization and having a
message stack that allows for multiple priority levels can be very helpful.
PHOTOS BY ATLASIED
HAVE YOU ever walked into an airport and immediately
been bombarded by sounds coming at you from
every direction? From other passengers' conversations
to mechanical noise to overhead pages in a highly reverberant
space and music wafting out of retail stores and
eateries, it's a lot to take in and process.
Gate change and passenger
announcements, safety and security
information, background music,
and general marketing messaging all
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JUSTIN YOUNG
Justin Young is the General Manager
at AtlasIED. Based in Louisville,
Kentucky, he has expertise in materials
management, operations, test
engineering, and quality assurance,
along with his decades of AV industry
experience.
compete for each person's attention,
often simultaneously. In emergencies,
airport managers must capture the
notice of distracted and often stressed
passengers to deliver actionable and
perhaps critical safety information,
which is no easy feat.
No Two Airports are Alike
Airports are placing increasing importance
on the passenger experience as
they flow through the airport. While
many commonalities exist among
airport installations, there are always
20 \ AIRPORT BUSINESS / MAY/JUNE 2023
Competing Needs
While airports often deploy multiple
systems for audio announcements, it
creates the potential to compete with
one another. Retail and eateries may
want to avoid pages being made over
their systems for fear of annoying or
upsetting customers. And some retail
audio systems are wholly separate from
the airport's mass notification system.
Yet, airport managers are required to
communicate audible and intelligible
messages to all affected persons during
security situations. Most transportation
hubs have strict requirements for
audibility and intelligibility per local
or national fire codes such as NFPA 72.
According to NFPA 72, " public mode
signaling " is required to provide and
maintain a sound pressure level of 15
decibels (dBA) above ambient sound
levels. Those messages may take the
form of live or pre-recorded messages,
sometimes in multiple languages. So
meeting everyone's needs is often a
masterclass in compromise.
System Consolidation
is the Future
Modern mass communicat ion
systems have to be flexible to be a
viable solution and there are a lot of
benefits of a homogenous, extensible
system architecture that can scale in
size and feature set. Multiple platforms
offer integration capabilities
for airport personnel to control audio
in every zone and customize the
zones through software rather than
making physical hardware changes or
running additional cables. Also, an
May/June 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of May/June 2023
