Meantime, the airlines are under more financial pressure than ever as businesses and consumers cut back on travel amid a weak economy and fears of terrorism. The airlines are looking to outsource as much as they can, Marchi says. "If a ticket printer breaks at most airports, Delta has to fly someone in to fix it," he says. "At McCarran, they have the spare parts and the technician on site, and they just repair it for the airline." A printer problem is usually resolved in about 30 minutes, Bourgon says. McCarran doesn't charge the airlines separately for service calls.
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."
Why McCarran Is Different
McCarran has an advantage over many other U.S. airports because it's a so-called origin and destination airport; people don't generally fly through Vegas, they fly to it. This means no one airline dominates by operating a hub. Those that do, such as United Airlines in Denver, can dictate the IT approach at their home airports, because if United were to disappear, the impact on the airport, and the local economy, would be catastrophic. At McCarran, only 8 percent of passengers are going somewhere else, compared with 60 percent in Denver. If any single airline halts service to Las Vegas, passengers simply take another airline. America West Airlines, for instance, went from 139 flights per day to 79 per day last year, but McCarran saw no difference in volume, Walker says.
McCarran takes on the expense of administering and maintaining nearly all airport systems on behalf of the airlines. (Southwest and America West have some IT staff on premises.) Upgrades are McCarran's problem. But the airport gains efficiencies in return: It has increased gate capacity more than 10 percent, and officials maintain that the added capacity saves them 757s full of money.
This is because McCarran uses preferential gate leasing instead of dedicated gate leasing. If a gate isn't being used, McCarran has the right to assign it to another airline on the fly. This makes more efficient use of the gates and avoids the expense of building more gates to accommodate more passengers.
Ross Johnson, McCarran's assistant director of finance, figures the airport has saved $120 million since the common-use systems were deployed in 1998 by sidestepping the need to build 10 additional gates. That figure doesn't include the operating costs to clean and maintain another terminal building.
Walker puts it this way: If the airport had to take out a loan to build a new terminal, at an interest rate of 6 percent, that $120 million would have cost McCarran $39 million during the five years since CUTE went live.
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