New Airfield Lighting Vault Helps Guide the Way at Baltimore/Washington Int’l

Few people realize this, but Baltimore figures prominently in the U.S. national anthem. “The rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air” was how poet Francis Scott Key described the War of 1812 as it lit up the city’s skies and helped soldiers see their star-spangled banner at night.

More than two centuries later, engineers and project stakeholders are singing the praises of how the community’s busy airport now powers and controls illumination for safe aircraft operations.

Last September, the Maryland Aviation Administration added a new $24 million airfield lighting vault at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI). The nondescript 7,000-square-foot building cuts a low profile from the outside, but the equipment inside its cinder block walls is vital for managing close to 300 commercial departures daily.

“It’s the cardiovascular system for airfield power distribution,” says Paul Shank, the airport’s chief engineer.

The computer systems for the new lighting vault work in tandem with power-providing equipment known as constant-current regulators. They, in turn, supply a steady 5,000-volt stream to circuits that individually control edge lights, centerlines and other essential airfield lighting systems. While some airports have several vaults spread over different sites, BWI controls the lighting for each of its runways and their supporting taxiways and navigational aids within a single consolidated facility.

Chief among the new vault’s benefits is the redundancy it brings to day-to-day capabilities. Three identical, fire-rated regulator rooms physically segregate the lighting systems for each of the three runways, reducing the likelihood that a single event could knock more than one offline. Generating equipment, control systems and telecommunications gear also exist in separate rooms. Utility feeds from Baltimore Gas and Electric come from both the north and south for more redundancy, and preventive measures were also added to reduce the risk of arc flashes inside these highly electrified spaces.

Shank and others throughout the industry collectively gasped this March when a fire at an offsite electrical substation took London’s Heathrow Airport (LHR) offline for nearly a full day. The unfortunate incident prompted memories of less-significant, but still noticeable, electrical disruptions at BWI over the years, as well as confidence in the airport’s new lighting vault. In fact, Shank suspects it could help woo airlines considering new routes at the Maryland gateway.

“New entrants look at your infrastructure and what is the risk that the airport facility will not accommodate their operations,” he says. “Our ALV [airfield lighting vault] is now a selling point.”

A Long Time Coming

The airport’s previous airfield lighting vault came online in the mid-1980s and resided in a portion of a fire station located off the ends of concourses B and C. The fire department relocated to a new facility in 1997, but the lighting gear remained and was later expanded throughout the building.

BWI intended to add a purpose-built lighting vault in 2019, though the project was slightly delayed—and then more extensively delayed by the global pandemic in 2020. The subsequent design process required nearly 18 months to complete, followed by a year and a half of construction beginning in February 2023. In addition to constructing the vault building, the project also included site excavation; additional utility ductwork and cabling; a new 30-foot-wide apron surrounding the structure; and a new vehicle service road.

Shank was a young project engineer when the airport’s former lighting vault came online inside the firehouse. His running joke with BWI’s recently departed Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Ricky Smith was that Shank has outlasted it—and many other projects built early in his BWI career.

“They literally wear out before I do,” he laughs.

Kidding aside, Shank notes that the culture of Maryland and its government agencies “skews toward frugality.” As a result, BWI is especially careful to maximize the longevity and efficiency of its infrastructure.

“When we spend a dollar, we like to get a dollar or two return on investment,” he says. “And we’re really good at it.” Case in point: BWI’s repurposed fire station still served the airport for nearly 30 years after its aircraft rescue firefighters departed for their then-new digs across the field.

Still, Shank concedes the old airfield lighting vault had become “long in the tooth.” Electrical codes have evolved significantly since the late ‘90s, as has equipment. Fiber optic control systems have replaced outdated copper wiring, and today’s computers offer easier maintenance and a reduced power draw, he relates.

“You can’t just take out the old lightbulb and replace it with a new lightbulb. The new lightbulb is entirely different,” Shank explains. “So we were talking about more than just a new building.”

In fact, equipment for the airport’s previous airfield lighting vault had become so antiquated that workers routinely scrambled to find suitable replacement parts. For some preventive maintenance, parts orders took as long as 50 weeks to arrive, reports Joshua Love, chief facility maintenance officer for BWI’s Electrical Department.

Love’s team pulled pieces from older devices to create a makeshift parts inventory, though integrating old with new was often less than optimal. And even that approach had its limitations.

“When those began to run low, there was no other solution but to build a new (vault),” Love explains.

The Electrical Department’s productivity has skyrocketed since the facility opened, he adds.

Employees played a hands-on role in optimizing the new vault. After an internal group spent close to two years evaluating how new constant-current regulators could best function at BWI, the building includes more room to work and remove parts. Feedback also helped designers craft helpful small touches, such as customized graphics for the airfield lighting control and monitoring system.

“You can double click and get real-time updates on each regulator, each piece of equipment and what it’s doing,” says Love. “We now have rooms that are absolutely dialed-in per task.”

Better Location, Better Design

Beyond the old fire station’s age and ill-fit design for housing lighting infrastructure, its location creates a choke point for aircraft and surface vehicles traversing a busy stretch of BWI’s outer ramp.

“(The vault) was hard to get to it with planes going by all the time,” says Galen Dixon of ADB SAFEGATE, the Columbus, Ohio-based firm that provided the core electrical equipment for the new airfield lighting.

As the firm’s sales director for the Northeastern United States, Dixon has worked on projects at BWI for nearly 20 years. He says airport leadership initially held off on updating the lighting vault to align funding and concentrate on more urgent projects including terminal expansions and installing LED lights along the runways.

Once the decision was made to relocate the vault, however, he says BWI management ensured the modernized facility would include upgrades to meet the airport’s needs for decades to come. These include capacity for more than 70 distinct circuits and switchgear regulator systems that are easier to maintain.

Separate bays and spare circuits support the ability to “pop and swap” should any units suffer a breakdown. A massive Kohler backup generator capable of powering the entire airfield for up to 24 hours resides onsite, as does a cache of neatly organized spare parts. The design also includes massive sliding doors for the installation or replacement of larger equipment. And although no one is regularly stationed inside the vault, a restroom was included for the convenience of workers.

This is one of the airport’s three fire-rated control rooms that house switchgear regulator control systems to manage runway lighting.

“It’s the heart of the airfield; and it’s a showpiece,” Dixon says, beaming with pride. “A lot of the stuff in the design reflects things I’ve been preaching for years. It’s kind of cool to see it installed.”

Maryland-based Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson Inc. was the designer of record for the project. Associate Vice President for Aviation David Stewart, who has worked with BWI for nearly 20 years, served as a consultant task manager on the project. From his perspective, its significance to the economy and overall quality of life in the northern Chesapeake Bay region cannot be overstated.

“The ALV [airfield lighting vault] is a whole new critical infrastructure,” he says, adding that BWI is a regional asset that has an $11.3 billion annual economic impact and supports 107,000+ area jobs.

Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson hired Jacobs, a Dallas-based conglomerate, to assist with project design, including architectural, mechanical and some electrical components and systems. Pete Butler, a vice president and East Region aviation director for the company, reports that Jacobs employs more than a dozen engineers/designers who specialize in airfield lighting vaults. They typically complete one or two new projects per year, with additional work from clients upgrading existing vaults.

Butler says the BWI vault design adopted best practices from similar facilities at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) and Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). Building code language offered some direction, but knowing what has worked well elsewhere brought its own benefits to the process, he says. Jacobs also collaborated closely with members of BWI’s Maintenance and Operations teams to ensure the end product was desirable.

“The maintenance staff want to be able to walk in and be familiar with the equipment that’s there,” Butler explains. “The (firehouse vault) was so old it had different manufacturers’ equipment and different iterations. To be able to stay on top of maintenance for that was very difficult.

“Now you train staff for one set of equipment, and it’s consistent throughout the vault.”

The airport plans to add up to five gates at Concourse C after the former fire station/lighting vault building is razed, though no timeline for that work has been determined.

The airfield lighting vault has oversized doorways to accommodate large equipment used inside.

On Time, On Budget

Containing costs and staying on budget were key focus areas for Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson, general contractor Allan Myers, construction manager Michael Baker International and project manager McKnight International. With the project commencing on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was crucial to secure longer lead components, particularly transformers, well in advance. Such planning kept things on time and on budget, notes Stewart.

Given the project’s location, care was taken to prevent incursions into the movement area and, during winter, a nearby deicing pad that remained active during construction. Shank notes that “people, not companies” can make mistakes, so each worker had to receive training and certification before accessing the job site.

The airport maintains a backup power generator that can power its entire airfield lighting network for up to 24 hours.

“You don’t want some unfamiliar supplier bringing in a box of lightbulbs and taking a wrong turn,” he says. Dust mitigation and ensuring that construction lighting didn’t impede visibility for pilots were also central to the safety program.

Looking back, Butler credits BWI’s persistence and commitment to completing the project—even when COVID-19 led to cost reductions and delays for capital projects at airports worldwide.

“An ALV [airfield lighting vault] is not sexy…It doesn’t have a return on investment right away. But the airport recognized if you don’t have lights, you don’t have planes,” Butler says. “This was something they said they had to have, and they never backed off the throttle on that focus.”

Adds Love: “Landing aircraft have the assurance that the lights are going to stay on. For the next 20, 30 years we’re looking really good.”