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Fire Engineering
Aviation
Buro Happold
Fire safety design for modern aviation facilities needs to address more than life safety. A clear
understanding and focus on reducing business interruption and understanding the interaction
between fire safety and security is essential to produce an effective fire strategy.
Increases in air passenger numbers have had several
consequences for today’s airport designers. Airports
have become multifunctional spaces which offer
retail and catering facilities, and which must be easily
accessible in terms of bus/rail links.
This diversity of function has manifested itself by an
increase in open spaces, making traditional fire safety
compartmentation and travel distances difficult to
achieve. Prescriptive building codes have not kept pace
with developments in airport design and do not fully
address the need for integration with other disciplines
such as security.
In order to develop the most appropriate fire safety
strategy for these multifunctional and complex
buildings, our fire engineers will carry out a design fire
risk assessment, often going back to first principles to
achieve clarity of design that can be lost through a code
based process.
To achieve these non- standard solutions, our fire
engineers apply lateral thinking combined with a
thorough awareness of airport design. We use state
of the art fire engineering modelling tools to provide
safe, secure and cost effective solutions that fulfil client,
designer and passenger’s needs.
Case Study : Gibraltar Airport
Image: bblur Architecture
Our involvement with the new Gibraltar airport
is an example of our full service provision. We
have worked closely with the team from early
conceptual design, through detailed strategy
review, implementation and site inspection, to
carrying out risk assessments for the operators
to allow partial occupation and operation of the
building.
Edinburgh Airport, Edinburgh, Scotland
Architect: 3D Reid
TAG McLaren Airport, Farnborough, UK
Architect: bblur
Image: Buro Happold/Adam Wilson
Delhi Air Traffic Control Tower, Delhi, India
Architect: HOK
Image: HOK