Care and Feeding
In addition to the 30 IT staffers McCarran employs, five Electronic Data Systems technicians work on site. They help maintain the network and develop improvements to the flight information display systems (FIDS) that tell passengers when planes are arriving and departing. Marty Beeman, an EDS software developer at McCarran, says he's working on several display improvements, including voice recognition and emergency messaging.
Information about departures and arrivals is also integrated across airlines. Displays carry flight information for all the airlines, whereas in most domestic airports each carrier has its own screens. What's more, McCarran controls which flight data is shown to passengers. The airlines' data is used by default, but several times per minute that data is checked against the FAA's logs, and if the airline is off by 12 minutes or more, it loses control of the flight display.
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Operation Override
McCarran controls which flight data is shown to passengers on the flight monitors throughout the airport. The airlines' is used by default, but if the FAA's data feed conflicts with an airline's data by 12 minutes or more, the carrier loses control of the flight display.
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In contrast, most flight displays in domestic airports are fully controlled by the airlines. If a snowstorm grounds planes, the displays might claim that flights are on time even though they're not taking off. The technicality, of course, is that the airline isn't causing the flight to be delayed. At McCarran, "we try to give the airlines the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to keep their information as accurate as possible, so we don't want to say, 'OK, if you're one minute off, you're out of luck,' " Bourgon says. "We want to give them some control and flexibility to be able to convey to the public what they want to convey."
The only systems at McCarran that aren't integrated are the parking, central-plant and security systems. It pains Walker that he still has to use them. "I hate proprietary systems," he says, pointing to the high cost of maintaining and repairing systems that only one company can service. "I hate them with a passion."
