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On October 31, 2023, Terminal A was officially inaugurated with a ceremonial flight by ‘Etihad Airways’. Etihad Airways is based in Abu Dhabi. As of November 1, 2023, Terminal A of Abu Dhabi International Airport is open to the public. Between November 1 and 14, 2023, the airlines were gradually relocated to the new terminal, and from November 14, 2023, all 28 airlines became fully operational. The terminal can handle 79 aircraft simultaneously with a capacity of 11,000 passengers per hour.
Since 2007, Peutz has been involved in the design of the public address and evacuation system for the large publicly accessible areas, such as the arrival and departure halls, the central hall, and the piers, as well as the local gate announcements. The enormous dimensions posed a challenge to achieving good speech intelligibility. The terminal covers an area of 742,000 m².
To minimize the impact on acoustics, column speakers were used, allowing a very narrow beam angle to be achieved through digital filtering—also known as Beam Steering. Beam steering creates a so-called lobe that is directed at ear level towards the travelers. With such systems, distances of up to 70 meters can be bridged with a uniform sound field from front to back. This principle has been developed and applied by Peutz since the 1980s at Schiphol and is still active in Departure Hall 3. These systems ensure that most of the energy is directed to where it is needed (towards the travelers), and minimal energy reaches the ceiling, thereby minimizing the reverberation time of the space.
The entire terminal of Abu Dhabi has been modeled in 3D, and simulations have been conducted to calculate speech intelligibility.
The distances in Abu Dhabi are so vast that the travel time of sound, approximately 340 m/s, poses a potential risk. When all loudspeakers start
simultaneously, signals from more distant loudspeakers can be perceived as echoes by a listener due to the sound travel time. Therefore, a zero point was chosen in the large central hall. From this zero point, all loudspeakers are directed outward, all the way to the ends of the piers. All loudspeakers are time-corrected so that they align with the zero point. On the longest piers, the most distant loudspeakers are delayed by up to 1750 ms compared to the zero point.
The manufacturer of the installed loudspeakers (Fohhn) has, according to their own statement, fully adopted the time corrections from the Peutz design and confirmed that the system functions as intended.
