Performance Outages Are on the No-Fly List This Holiday Season

Airports already are ramping up for the holiday travel season—or if they aren’t, they should be. CNN reported that summer air travel in the United States reached new record-setting levels in 2024, particularly around Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day holidays. This pattern is anticipated to hold true for the upcoming November and December holiday season as well. Operating more flights than usual and accommodating larger crowds in airports can lead to a domino effect of disruptions if network or application performance in one area of the airport is interrupted.

Major airports are truly their own complex ecosystems, composed of many systems, processes, and technology services essential to smooth operations. Observability into the performance of each network and mission-critical application is vital to assure passengers complete their travel as quickly as possible; TSA rapidly screens high volumes of travelers; vendors can make, sell, and process as many orders as possible; and so on. Maximizing efficiency is the ultimate goal, and delivering quality experiences for travelers and vendors in the airport is an added priority along the way.

Airport Complexity Requires Observability

Here are five key areas in major airports that benefit from enhanced observability to assure performance:

1. Payment authorization: Payments are accepted throughout an airport—at restaurants, retailers, and kiosks, baggage check, and even exiting the parking garage. Contactless payment options are more frequent now than ever before, making delays in payment processing unacceptable. Rapid troubleshooting is critical because of the complexity of payment issues. Slowdowns at these check-out counters could be attributed to the local airport connection, the wide area network (WAN) on which the request goes out, the payment processing vendor’s network, or the application itself. While IT teams search for the culprit, queues continue to build at the retailer, delay travelers, and frustrate merchants.
2. Wi-Fi connectivity: Reliable Wi-Fi makes for a smooth travel experience—and virtually everyone at the airport is searching for connectivity, making it easy to overwhelm the airport’s network. Whether businesspeople are working remotely and connecting to their laptops, teenagers are scrolling through social media, or travelers are refreshing their airline mobile application to check their flight status, airport Wi-Fi is in high demand. The complexity of airport infrastructures can make it difficult to determine if the problem traces back to a Wi-Fi hot spot or the airport’s physical network connection to the internet. Determining where congestion occurs, when it is happening most, and what capacity changes need to be made is essential to supporting Wi-Fi connectivity.
3. Applications: Both mobile and hardwired applications are needed to make today’s modern airport travel run efficiently. Resource management systems (RMSs) may be composed of mobile applications for crew scheduling, passenger ticketing, and gate status checks. Other general mobile applications include rideshare checkpoints for pickup and drop-off, MyTSA for global entry information, Google Translate to interpret airport signage, and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family when traveling. Hardwired applications are also used—for example, at computer help desks for rebooking flights and tracking baggage for customers. Ensuring the performance of Wi-Fi, internet and WAN connectivity, vendor applications, hosted applications, and so many other application services is crucial throughout the airport.
4. Technology services: Major airports have modernized with a litany of advanced technology services. Security scanners, passport recognition software, RFID luggage tracking, digital signage, autonomous baggage handling, flight information display boards, and the TSA network are just a few of the many technologies requiring available application services to deliver a swift travel experience at various points in the airport. Luggage tracking technology is tied to an airline’s specific network or application, while TSA and passport recognition are tied to the network and applications of Homeland Security. It is worth noting that since Memorial Day weekend, the TSA has screened an average of nearly 2.7 million passengers each day, compared with approximately 2.3 million over the same period in 2019. Comprehensive observability helps IT teams assure the performance of technology services for each of these areas in the airport during high-volume peak travel times.
5. Communications for safety: Air traffic control (ATC) is paramount to the safety of all passengers and employees at an airport. Transponders, radar signals, and satellite communications are just a few of the essential pieces to ATC’s operations that require strong connectivity to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) network. There are also advanced safety systems at airports that communicate in real time with pilots and aircraft crew on the conditions for secure landings. Braking action measurement systems are used to report on runway friction and must be fully functioning to comply with regulations set in place by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Reliable voice and video communications are paramount to maintaining safety standards throughout the airport ecosystem.

NETSCOUT Solutions for Airports

The aviation industry has many complexities. Not only do airlines have their own specific technologies and challenges, but airports themselves have a unique makeup with intertwined systems and processes that people are counting on to get to their destinations. Although a traveler’s experience at one airport versus another may be completely different, all airports share in common the need for comprehensive observability to manage performance throughout their unique environment.

With NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, IT teams for leading airports can continuously gather packet-level performance insights and proactively assess user experience quality to get ahead of emerging issues. Using deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale, NETSCOUT’s vendor-agnostic performance management solutions empower IT teams to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) and ensure reliable network and application performance at airports no matter the time of year.

Gear up for the holiday season and learn more about how NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions are helping airports prepare.