RGIA comes up with touch-less elevators

Ranga Reddy: To fight the pandemic, Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad has been on a constant lookout for new and innovative ways to provide safer services to its passengers.

Recently, it has taken up a project to transform the airport departure-level elevator from a traditional push-button control to a more secure touch-less one to enhance passenger safety. A touch-less elevator control system based on infra-red (IR) technology was developed as a part of an engineering innovation that gives solutions for complex problems. The developers have developed infrared sensors that simply go to any level they want to, depending on the position of the fingers.

It was tested and came out to be a success in one of the elevators at the departure-level where users of this elevator can simply move their hands close to the sensor to have the elevator on any floor they are standing. Likewise, the passengers inside the elevator must move their hand near the floor number button where they want to go. The sensor also detects the arm at 0.1–10 cm from the button surface.

Following the successful completion of this pilot project, the airport is working to implement this in all the 24 elevators used by passengers at the airport terminal building. The airport for the safety and convenience of passengers and RGIA at present is using the full e-boarding facility.

At present, RGIA has self-check-in kiosks, tech-enabled entry gates, self-luggage drop, virtual information desk for travellers, UV-enabled disinfection of automatic tray retrieval systems (ATRS) inspection at pre-embarkation security screening zones, ARTS and many more facilities. After the unlock process when the airport resumed its operations on May 15, the number of average passengers travelling daily were around 3,000 and today the count is over 20,000 which is almost 7 times more. Initially, the airport operated with just 40 flights a day, but today it has increased 5-fold to almost 200 flights a day. Before the pandemic, there were flights to 55 national destinations every day. Now, it has been revived by 93 per cent to 51 destinations.