Key cargo

Work started on site in September 1996 on the £250 million project that would become the Cargocentre. It is state-of-the-art through and through; from the exterior cladding which has been designed to ensure that it doesn't interfere with the aircraft radar, to the layout of the baggage handling equipment. Its multi-floor design is the first of its kind in the World.

To date, 4·5 million man hours have been put in to the project and work is continuing. The first phase opened for business on 19 January this year, handling intact container loads, and final completion of the project is forecast for early next year. The Cargocentre will then be able to handle anything: "From articulated lorry loads of materials to you turning up with your Aunty Mabel's best Dresden china packed in a suitcase," as Morley puts it.

The Cargocentre is being built in order to make BA's Heathrow Airport facility into one of the world's leading cargo handling centres. It is, in fact, BA's largest ever single investment outwside that of passenger aircraft.

When complete, the new building will take over all operations which are currently carried out in the adjacent existing cargo handling depot. This building actually has a larger footprint than the new one but all operations are carried out on a single storey – it is also 30 years old and can only process 450 000 tonnes of cargo per year.

The baggage handling equipment and its multi-floor layout is a totally new idea. On the first level (ground floor) are lorry docks for loading and off-loading cargo, both landside and airside – airside being the area policed by gun-toting guards, where cargo is stored and readied for loading on to the aircraft. The second level is the build-and-break location, where containers are unpacked or loaded depending on whether they are in-coming or out-going. Cargo is packed into 1·4 m3 cages – there are 9540 of them – ready to be loaded on to the plane. The same happens on the third level but this area deals with smaller shipments. Finally, the fourth level is the consignment and container store, where cargo is stored ready for packing for a flight or delivery in the UK.

Nearly all of the operations on all four levels are automated. The mechanical cargo handling contract, undertaken by GEC Alstom and Lodige, is worth £87 million. It incorporates over 8000 roller decks and vertical conveyors and a ceiling suspended lifting and carrying system. This utilises forklift-type apparatus which can rotate 360o and lift up to 1000 kg, yet is sensitive enough to pick up a tray of drinks without spilling a drop.

The mechanical handling equipment is the showpiece and workhorse of the Cargocentre but behind the scenes a mass of equipment has been installed in the mechanical and electrical contract by a joint venture between Sulzer Infra UK and Kvaerner Rashleigh Phipps (now Weatherfoil), SKRP.

Incoming power to the Cargocentre is fed into six main loadframe distribution panels, from Dorman Smith, one for the offices and five for the warehouse. Five electrical risers are positioned at intervals within the buffer zone, a 35 m high atrium running centrally down the entire 300 m length of the building between the landside and the airside and five down the south elevation. Power is distributed throughout the building via 26 sub-main switchboards with incoming 200 A isolators and fuse switch outgoing devices. Off-riser panels containing 200 A fused tap-off units are used to connect directly to the rising main busbar, from MEM. In all, 216 Dorman Smith sub-panels are used to distribute the power throughout the building.

In case of a power loss, the transformers are wired in sequence and so if one fails the load is passed on, reducing downtime to a minimum. The mains supply, too, has been designed with 50% redundancy in case of power difficulties.

Lighting to the project is designed to BA's own guidelines and is predominantly supplied by Thorn. It is dimmable and a mixture of high frequency fluorescent T8s, compact fluorescents and SON. Emergency luminaires are again Thorn fittings, fitted with an Existalite inverter/battery pack. Also used in the emergency lighting package are the same small luminaires that are installed into the aircraft floors to guide you down the aisle. These are situated at ankle level on escape routes throughout the building.

A building which incorporates so many innovations is bound to have teething problems though. The roof of the buffer zone is glazed, and when the emergency lighting was turned on before dawn the glare through the glazed area obscured the control tower's view of aircraft as they took off. This is now being rectified.

Energy management to the Cargocentre is controlled using a system from Synchronised Systems and miles of pipework and ductwork, supplied by Sulzer Infra, Rushworth and Fire Protection, pumps fresh water and conditioned air to all parts of the building.

The project had up to 1100 operatives working on site at its peak and it has won the RoSPA Gold Award for Safety. BA will have to be on form to function as well as that.