An airport elevator carries a passenger who is late, unfamiliar with the building, often travelling alone, and frequently not a native speaker of the local language. It sits in a facility that never closes, on a network that is partly secure-side, inspected more heavily than almost any other building type. That combination is not what a generic elevator phone was designed for.
This is the problem specific to airports. Someone presses the call button in a stopped elevator and the operator asks where they are. In an office building the answer is easy. In an airport the passenger has no idea. They do not know the terminal naming, the level naming or which bank of elevators they walked into. What you get is a description of a nearby gate, if you are lucky, and a lot of guessing while a person is stuck in a box.
So the system does not ask them. Every elevator is named individually in the platform, and the call arrives already identified: which car, which terminal, which level. The location is shown on a map, so the operator is looking at where the passenger is before the passenger has finished the first sentence.
In a facility with hundreds of cars across terminals, garages and connectors, that is the difference between dispatching someone in seconds and spending several minutes working out where to send them.
Elevator phones are rarely the only emergency communication you run. Emergency help points, assistance points at gates, platforms and entrances, blue-light phones, parking structure call boxes. These are often separate systems from separate vendors, each with its own answering arrangement and its own failure modes.
They can be consolidated onto one platform. One place to answer them, one place to monitor them, one place to see what is working.
Airports are among the small set of facilities that genuinely staff a command center around the clock, alongside hospitals, universities, transit systems and large government buildings. Elevator calls answered there reach people who know the terminal, can dispatch immediately, and are already coordinating with airport police and fire.
That is a materially better outcome than a call routed off site to an operator working out which terminal and which level before doing anything. Where the operations center is not resourced to take elevator calls, a monitoring provider covers it and the same equipment routes there instead.
Where configured for PSAP operation, the platform can support elevator emergency calls and 911 within the same answering environment rather than through two disconnected processes. A call can be answered, assessed and escalated without the passenger being transferred, put on hold, or dropped between systems.
Emergency Communication Path Supervision, or ECPS, is the part of this that facilities teams notice first.
Verifying elevator phones used to mean sending someone to every car to press the call button and wait for an answer. In a portfolio of any size that is a day of work, done infrequently, and it only tells you the phone worked at the moment somebody stood in front of it.
LiftComm supervises the communication path automatically. Every elevator, every 30 seconds. If a path fails you get an alert immediately, not at the next inspection and not when a passenger is already stuck in the car.
Airport networks are segmented for security reasons and the segmentation does not follow the building layout. An on-premises system stays inside your infrastructure with no outbound dependency, which is a shorter conversation with your security team than a cloud-hosted alternative and a shorter one again at audit.
The elevators that generate calls are often not the ones in the departures hall. Parking structures, rental car centers, people mover stations, connector bridges and employee facilities all have cars, and they are frequently on older equipment and separate maintenance arrangements. One system covers the whole estate with every car named and mapped.
An airport cannot lose an elevator during a peak bank of flights, and some cars cannot come out of service at all during the day. Our installations are almost all retrofits into buildings that keep running, scheduled around operations.
Where the car operating panel cannot be cut into, the surface mount version installs without touching it.
Elevator emergency communication is governed by ASME A17.1 and CSA B44, adopted state by state and city by city with local amendments. What applies to your building depends on which edition your authority having jurisdiction has adopted and on when the work is permitted, and current requirements apply to new installations and qualifying alterations rather than retroactively. In New York City the operative document is the NYC Building Code, Appendix K. We build to whichever edition governs your building, and we will tell you which one that is.
The surface mount unit is optional. It goes in place of the in-panel EAV where the car operating panel cannot be modified.
EAV Elevator Phone Series
EAV Elevator Phone Surface Mount
Mechanical Room | Security Desk Phone.avif)
2Wire Network & POE Converter
On-Premise PBX & Emergency Elevator Call SystemOur elevator emergency communication is installed and in service at Orlando International Airport, operated by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.
Outside aviation, the closest comparable environment is the New York subway: continuous public operation, heavy inspection, public procurement, and no tolerance for equipment that only works sometimes. 96 MTA stations completed as of 2025 run our systems. See the full station record.
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