ARINC Wins Belfast City Airport Contract.

Friday 3rd June 2011

Hosted Check-In Will Cut Costs and Carbon Footprint:

Annapolis, Maryland, USA, June 3, 2011--ARINC Incorporated today announced it has been awarded the contract for a new passenger check-in system at George Best Belfast City Airport, a busy regional airport in Northern Ireland.

ARINC has already started installation of its vMUSE EnterpriseTM hosted check-in solution, which reduces airport IT costs, power consumption, and space requirements while delivering the efficiency of a modern common-use passenger system.

"The check-in costs at Belfast City Airport will be optimised with our hosted CUPPS (Common Use Passenger Processing) service," stated Tony Chapman, Senior Director, Integrated Travel Solutions, ARINC EMEA. "Hosted services are becoming increasingly popular due to the economic benefits they offer, and most experts believe the next decade will see a significant move from PC-based applications to hosted models."

Raymond Hooke, Airside Operations Manager, Belfast City Airport, stated that "The vMUSE Enterprise concept brings to the table a number of key advantages including a much smaller capital investment, lower energy consumption, less space requirements and a significantly reduced roll out time.

Additionally, because the system monitoring and administration is accomplished in real time at the ARINC date center, there is no need for an IT administrator exclusively focused on the passenger check-in system. From our first encounter with ARINC, it was clear they were a highly efficient and agile organization who could listen, as well as understand, client requirements and were prepared to customize their solution accordingly."

Airports that adopt ARINC's hosted check-in service can replace their costly on-site servers and workstations with simpler and less expensive 'thin client' hardware. The actual processing of passenger data is accomplished at ARINC's data center, with data delivered back to the airport desk in real time as a hosted service.

Moving software functions that were formerly on the airport user's workstation into 'virtual machines' located in ARINC's data center provides security benefits as well as reducing capital and operational expenses.

"Our hosted check-in is, in effect, software as a service," continued Chapman. "It delivers a scalable, low cost check-in solution for airports. It is totally reliable, utterly secure, and minimizes potential lost revenues associated with outages caused by system failures."

The hosted approach provided by ARINC's vMUSE Enterprise service enables 'thin client' devices--user workstations without hard drives or moving parts--to be used in place of conventional computers at service desks, and eliminates the need for expensive on-site servers and associated infrastructure. It also allows for additional workstations to be added much more quickly than in a conventional installation, and the extended MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rate allows for lower service costs.

ARINC Incorporated, a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, provides communications, engineering and integration solutions for commercial, defense and government customers worldwide. Headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland with regional headquarters in London and Singapore, ARINC is ISO 9001:2008 certified. For more information, visit the web site at:

www.arinc.com.