Manchester, New Hampshire Airport
Manchester, New Hampshire Airport
The Manchester Airport, located in South Eastern New Hampshire is expanding to accommodate increasing passenger capacity. In 1999 projects were in planning or under construction to extend runways, reconstruct taxiways, build a new six‑level parking garage and an expansion of the passenger terminal. This restructuring of the airport required a relocation of the air traffic control tower. The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) National Airspace System Implementation Program was tasked with designing the tower and its control room. The National Airspace System (NAS) Implementation Center in New England Region (ANI-100) created the engineering drawings. They used Microstation CAD to construct 3-D drawings of these facilities. They only had limited parts of the airport drawn and the “walk-through” feature in this CAD software was not as advanced or effective as they wanted. ANI needed some other method of providing their customer with a more effective means of visualizing and evaluating the new structures within the context of the full airport.
NAS Implementation Center came to the Research Development Human Factors Lab (RDHFL) to have a high fidelity architectural walk through of their engineering effort at the Manchester airport. We accepted the job in December, 1999 and ultimately used electronic copies of their CAD files which included a 2‑D drawing of the airport field including runways and other building footprints. These files were converted to AutoCAD Dynamic Exchange Format (.dxf) using an export facility built into Microstation. We received these files via FTP and then used AutoCAD 2000 to manipulate the files further, basically stripping away unnecessary layers of the drawings. We then used a file conversion utility to change the .dxf file format to our modeling language, Open Flight, the native format for Multigen Creator. Numerous anomalies were introduced during the file format conversions that resulted in some delays and additional work. This project required more than one month to complete, due in part to the fact that this was the RDHFL’s first experience with Microstation files. Our modeling work for this project began in late January, 2000.
The Virtual Reality Lab (VRL) within the RDHFL at the William J. Hughes Technical Center produced a VHS video cassette recording a fly‑through of the Manchester Airport visualizing the new and old control tower locations, new parking garage, airport terminal expansions, taxiways and apron extensions. We delivered this video to our customer, the ANI-100 division of the New England Region of the FAA. They in turn used the video to illustrate to their customer, the Manchester Airport Authority where the new facilities would be located and what they would look like when construction was finished. The Airport Authority in turn showed the video to the Manchester planning board to appraise them of changes to the airport. Building this model in a real time 3D environment allowed our client to generate a portable video tape of the scene to show their clients what the construction would look like and they eventually incorporated some of the footage in a promotional video used at the airport during construction. Additionally, final location and height of the air traffic control tower was determined with assistance from our model. Finally, due to continued demand to expand the airport, we can easily and cost effectively assist them in the future. For example, they have determined they will need to connect two runways with a taxiway, since we have already modeled the full airport it is small work to add the new taxiway. Then we can show them what the view from the tower will look like before construction to identify any possible sight restrictions.
This RDHFL capability allows airport designers to stand inside the new control tower and evaluate whether construction proposals would obstruct the controllers line of sight, even before blueprints are finished. Considerable time and money can be saved when design errors are found while still in the design stage of development.