Blog Article for Changi Airport Group (Changi East)

As a senior engineer at Changi Airport Group, Gabriel Cheong is responsible for influencing the development of Singapore’s most-renowned airport. Recently, he has been working on an upgrade to its runways, which will more than triple the airport’s capacity to meet the growing demand for air travel.

It’s a ton of work, but in some ways it makes his job easier because he gets to make safety a priority.

Gabriel’s role in the upgrade is critical. The airport will soon adopt a three-runway system, which means that he is charged with ensuring that lights are right where they need to be on the ground.

Commonly known as runway or airfield lights, such lights are designed to guide planes near or on a runway. Pilots rely on them to figure out where they must land on, take off or wheel towards, which is especially handy at night or in low-visibility weather.

“Even though air traffic control is there to keep them safe, it makes sense for airfield lights to provide that extra assurance that pilots need in their decision-making. And it’s not like pilots have to spot that one tiny light on the runway. They usually see a bunch of easily noticeable lights along a stretch that point to where they need to go next,” Gabriel said.

Changi Airport already has over 11,000 lights across its airfield space, including the taxiway and runway sections. They are grouped into 20 different types, which include runway satellite lights, runway-etch lights, touchdown zone lights, approach lights among others.

Each section of the runway needs to have lights of a specific programming to help serve a specific function. When it comes to planning a new lighting installation, a big part of getting it right requires talking with regulators and other teams on the project.

Gabriel and his team often hold meetings with the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and the Engineering and Development division of Changi Airport Group. In the process, they get to discuss design and regulatory needs that the lighting installation must be capable of meeting, and set a common direction for solving these issues. These then help the team find what it considers the best way to complete the design, giving them a strong shot at approval from CAAS, the public authority responsible for reviewing airfield upgrades.

One tool that Gabriel’s team uses is the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s Annex 14, a set of accepted standards for the design, operation, and safety of airports and heliports. Airfield engineers around the world use these guidelines to simplify their work, as they contain precise specifications for virtually every aspect of any lighting installation such as how far apart the light must minimally be from its closest neighbour, how bright it must be, and the angle it must be positioned at.

Gabriel says that this practice is part of a controlled and disciplined approach to airfield lighting that his team is taking to help keep millions of aircrew, passengers and ground personnel safe every year. The familiarity of internationally adopted standards like Annex 14 helps minimise pilot errors, which would be hard to do if every airport instead had its own way of doing things.

This thinking also means that his team does extensive testing to ensure new airfield lights work as intended. "We check each circuit as soon as it's installed, then run a full system test once everything is in place," Gabriel says. "There is no room for error. The lights must work before they’re deployed for operational use. If I'm in the control tower and I turn a segment of lights on or off, it needs to happen exactly as expected on the ground.”

The team also conducts flight checks, each of which involves a pilot inspecting the airfield lights from the air. “During the flight check, if a light is angled 2 degrees too high for example, the pilot will report it via radio, and workers on the ground will make adjustments immediately while the check is still in progress,” Gabriel says. “Pilots expect certain lights to shine at them at specific angles when approaching a runway, so there is no tolerance for a light being a mere degree off.”

But, whilst it is necessary to meet standards and rules in place, it’s impossible to design airfield lighting without any flexibility. On-site conditions sometimes introduce unexpected obstacles that require careful adjustments.

Gabriel recalls a case where a planned cable path for a group of airfield lights was blocked by a deep drain, forcing his team to weigh different installation methods. “Running the cables overhead is easier for maintenance, but not always structurally sound. Doing it under might be more secure, but it makes replacing cables later a challenge,” he says. After consulting with engineering teams, they decided the drain was too wide to go over, and so they took the only viable option of routing the cables below.

More on Gabriel

When Gabriel first joined CAAG years ago, he quickly realised that airfield lighting is more than just a technical challenge. “I thought it would be simple when I first started,” he admits. “But every step, from the design stage to having to manage different stakeholders, comes with its own complexities.” Working closely with regulators and engineers has taught him that no detail is too small when safety is on the line.

As work on Changi’s new runways continues, Gabriel remains focused on the bigger picture. “You don’t often get the chance to help build something that will soon serve millions of people,” he says. “It’s a privilege to be part of that.”