Knights Brown was awarded the strategic power resilience upgrade to the new control tower at Gatwick Airport under our current civil engineering framework contract.

The project forms part of Gatwick’s upgrade programme aimed at ensuring continuity of supply to all operationally critical assets. This contributes to Gatwick remaining the most efficiently run, single runway airport in the world, with an average of 55 flights per hour.

Knights Brown was engaged on a design and build basis. Non-intrusive and intrusive surveys, inspections, validation and testing of all electrical services was required to inform our design.

It was a requirement to develop to BIM Level 2, producing 3D models for the existing and new switch rooms but based on the added value achieved, we developed a model for the control tower’s entire structure. We then went one step further, introducing virtual reality to multi-disciplinary clash detection workshops.

The various elements have incorporated electrical, civil engineering and building works all carried out by our dedicated team.

The biggest challenges related to keeping the control tower fully operational throughout and not putting Gatwick’s flight operations at risk, which has been successfully achieved without incident.

The excavation work for new discrete power supplies crossed numerous potentially dangerous and operationally significant services including communications connections, air traffic control fibres, fuel mains, high and low voltage cables, and gas and water mains.