Stansted Airport has over many years increased its capacity and ability to handle larger and larger volumes of aircraft and people traffic. Under its new owners, Manchester Airports Group, they have been looking to modernise not only their operational procedures, but also their behind-the-scenes airside operations. Being approached by the airside operations team, with two large paper maps in hand, and asking if it was possible to create new current versions the challenge was set.

Dragging them into the world of GIS and creating a spatial database that they could maintain themselves and use across many of their operational groups was the plan, but in the end they just wanted an update of the same paper maps. It seems their resistance to change was very high and this 20-minute presentation aims to show some of the advances there were made in creating the database and ultimately the end result – the new map!