Elevating Passenger Experience: The Application of Airport Innovation

Let the Journey Take Flight is the motto of the new terminal at Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport in Brownsville, Texas. Open since January; this state-of-the-art facility is ready to take business and leisure passengers wherever their journeys lie. And to ensure this terminal can handle the needs of both today and tomorrow, BRO brought in the experts at Parabit systems to provide the technology and systems that are best-in-class for today and are adaptable for the future.

Bryant Walker, Assistant City Manager and Aviation Administrator for the City of Brownsville, Texas, and Rob Leiponis, President and CEO of Parabit Systems, talked about the exciting transformation at BRO.

With the previous terminal at BRO dating back to 1972 and no longer meeting the compliance, commercial, and passenger needs of 2021, it was more than time for a new terminal. And with that decision in place, Walker said it was critical to design and build an Airport terminal that set a high bar.

“We wanted to make sure we future-proofed the terminal itself and built the technology and components in it that we could expand on and integrate technologies that yet don’t exist, as well as the latest technology Parabit provided a lot of as we build this,” Walker said.

It was essential to build into the infrastructure of the new terminal enough power, drainage, and utility corridors to handle whatever may come. “In the building itself, we ran additional conduit that is in excess of what we need for the access control, for the CCTV, and even a lot of the biometrics,” Walker said. “All of that we built into the design very early in that design phase so we can add everything that we wanted as well as the future technologies as they roll out.”