Building the World's Largest Airport with Cat® Connect
There’s a new airport under construction in Istanbul and it’s coming to life in just 42 months with help from Cat® Connect.
“It’s the largest investment in the history of the Turkish Republic,” says Yusuf Akçayoğlu, chief executive for IGA, the infrastructure consortium responsible for building and operating the airport. IGA is at work on phase one of the project which involves clearing and prepping the 79-square-kilometer site and building three runways and a terminal. More than two billion cubic meters of material will be moved, including unstable mine tailings up to 40 meters deep.
To handle the project’s huge scale, challenging site conditions and tight deadline, IGA assembled a fleet of 400 Cat machines. The units are equipped with a variety of productivity technologies including automated systems that improve grading accuracy, measure compaction on-the-go and track payload. The assets also feature remote monitoring systems that track performance and identify potential problems before things get serious.
Adem Karabudak serves as fleet manager for IGA. He and his team work with the local Cat dealer, using data from the machines to optimize fleet uptime and efficiency.
“We receive monitoring and maintenance data,” he says, plus “jobsite location tracking, remote fault code analysis, analysis of oil samples and interpretation of those analyses. Needless to say, it makes our job a whole lot easier.”
His Cat dealer partners agree.
Hakan Atay, a dealer service engineer, says remote monitoring is “like an eye watching us from the sky” that can “significantly simplify our jobs.”
Without this technology, Volkan Kuş, the dealer’s service manager, “Managing this kind of project would be virtually impossible.”
IGA’s leadership team is pleased with what Cat Connect makes possible. They’re also grateful for their Cat dealer’s resources and expertise.
“We have more or less reached peak capacities with all of the equipment,” says Akçayoğlu. “In addition to that, whether it be fuel savings or quality of service, right now I can say that we’re getting five-star service.”