Brivo’s Wireless Control Panels Deployed At Santa Monica Municipal Airport

Over eight Brivo wireless control panels were installed at the airport

The Situation

Santa Monica Municipal Airport sits on approximately 227 acres in the city of Santa Monica, California. It is one of the busiest single-runway airports in the nation with more than 150,000 flights per year.

The perimeter of the airport property and other restricted areas are controlled by fencing and eight access gates. Previously, a standard non-networked punch code access system was used to control the gates. Users accessed the airport simply by punching in an access code, which unlocked the gate.

The Challenge

This standalone electronic access control (EAC) system provided no airport-wide intelligence about who accessed the restricted gates or when. It was also too easy to relay new access codes from one person to another, regardless of authorization. Bob Trimborn, Santa Monica Airport Director and Assistant City Public Works Director, said the standalone access control system “…stays about as secure as water in a sieve,” and had become an unacceptable risk in today’s security environment.

Santa Monica Airport faced two unique challenges. First, the airport wanted all perimeter gates secured with networked access control. However, the gates were spread out over 227 acres and one gate was over a mile from the administration offices. Network installation across the property would require a tremendous amount of trenching and would have been prohibitively expensive. Second, the airport lacked the IT resources or expertise needed to manage the software, PCs, and servers required of comparable networked access control systems.

The Solution

As all the control panels are wireless, no trenching is required for system installation

Santa Monica selected Ultra-Safe Security to manage their security upgrade installation. Ron Lander, President of Ultra-Safe, was able to address the airport’s unique challenges by installing eight Brivo wireless control panels. Each gate included In and Out readers so that Trimborn could monitor ingress and egress from those locations. And because all of the control panels are wireless, no new trenching was required for system installation.

“The Brivo system provides us a lot of flexibility in how we operate it without needing a lot of hardware in our offices. It’s easy to program and reprogram gates, and we don’t have to do any hard-wiring,” stated Trimborn.

The Highlights

• No trenching necessary With Brivo’s use of wireless control panels that communicate via wireless wide area networking, no trenching was needed to install the control panels. Santa Monica Airport saved over $100,000 and two months of installation time.

• No IT expertise required Trimborn had scant technical resources to administer the system. Because all IT maintenance and networking is outsourced to Brivo’s professional staff, he was able to eliminate the need to maintain expensive IT resources and networking infrastructure.

• Email notifications Trimborn wanted tight control over airport entry with airport-wide access event visibility and management. He was able to configure the new system to deliver him email notifications based on any user event. This gave Trimborn a high-level digital audit trail with the ability to view and administer the entire system for specific individuals or gates.

• Access from any Web browser—anywhere, anytime Trimborn and his staff needed to manage the system from multiple locations. With Brivo, the system is accessible over the Web and is available from anywhere there is an Internet connection. This substantially improved event management and responsiveness by airport administration and public works staff.