Zone entry & exit
Automatic notification when a unit enters or leaves a stand, hangar or restricted area, confirming position without a manual check-in.
Application
Airlines, ground handlers and airports depend on GSE — dollies, baggage carts, tow bars, stairs, tug masters — to keep flights turning on time. Sensolus makes airport asset tracking simple: full visibility of every unit, across kilometres of apron and hangar, so nothing slows the turnaround.
GSE is mobile, non-powered and constantly on the move across sites that can stretch ten kilometres end to end. A dolly, a set of stairs or a tow bar is needed at a stand, but nobody knows where the nearest one is. Teams drive from one side of the field to the other, buffer stock piles up to compensate, and the paper logbook is always a step behind.
“Due to inefficient routes, our teams spent an unnecessary amount of time providing equipment. With the newly gained overview, many trips from one side of the airport site to the other can now be eliminated.”
Turnarounds don't slip because a cart is missing, they slip because of everything that happens when nobody can find it. Sensolus closes that visibility gap on four fronts.
Instantly find the nearest dolly, tow bar or set of stairs on the apron or in the hangar, instead of driving the field to look for it.
Zone-level usage and idle-time insights show which equipment is over- or under-utilised, so you stop over-buying to compensate for lost units.
Knowing where equipment already sits eliminates unnecessary cross-airport trips, cutting drive time, fuel and the carbon footprint of every deployment.
Digital logbooks document use and movement automatically, while alerts flag misplaced assets and prevent unauthorised loans between teams.
We've tracked ground support equipment since 2018, when TCR, the GSE rental leader running 26,000+ units across 120+ airports, chose Sensolus for non-powered GSE telematics. The years of deployments since show in cases like LOTAMS and Condor Technik.
"We chose Sensolus because it is the best product in the market. Very rugged trackers with a battery life of up to five years, built for the apron."
Measured across live Sensolus GSE deployments
Elias heads ground support operations at SkyRamp Ground Services*, a ground handler and line-maintenance provider at a major European hub. His team keeps around 850 non-powered GSE units moving: baggage dollies, tow bars, passenger and cargo stairs, oxygen and nitrogen carts, a fuel drain cart, engine washers. Until recently, every shift started the same way, on the radio, hunting for a free tow bar or a set of stairs while crews drove the field to find them.
The apron and hangar stretch up to nine kilometres end to end, all under a 30 km/h limit, so one unnecessary trip across the site costs real minutes. A set of stairs that arrives late holds an aircraft on stand, and one late turnaround ripples through the rest of the day. Multiply the hunt across 850 units and the case for real-time visibility makes itself.
*SkyRamp is a fictional use case, built from an aggregation of real Sensolus airport and ground-handling deployments, including the published LOTAMS and Condor Technik stories.
Follow the equipment through a single turnaround at SkyRamp. When a flight is inbound, the stand already calls for a known set of equipment: stairs, dollies, a tow bar, sometimes a fuel drain cart. Before Sensolus, finding each free unit meant a string of radio calls and a drive across the field. Now the dispatcher opens the platform and sees the closest available unit of each type, indoors or out, in seconds. Crews drive straight to it and on to the stand, so the trips from one side of the field to the other disappear. The unit enters the stand geozone and check-in is logged automatically, with no phone call and no paper sheet. When it returns to the pool, every movement is recorded to build the utilization and cycle data that right-sizes the fleet. And when a unit is flown to another station, the tracker shuts down for the flight per IATA rules and resumes on arrival.
Almost any ground support equipment can be tracked, powered or not. Units that roam the apron and travel between sites get a smart tracker with GPS; equipment that lives inside a hangar gains indoor visibility from geobeacon zones or Sensolus location tags. One platform gives you a single view of everything, everywhere.
| Asset type | Quantity | Tracker | Update frequency | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baggage dollies & carts | 300 | Smart tracker | GPS outdoor | Locate the nearest unit instantly, prevent loss, right-size the fleet |
| Tow bars & tug masters | 120 | Smart tracker | GPS outdoor | Cut cross-field trips, optimise deployment routes |
| Passenger & cargo stairs | 60 | Smart tracker | GPS outdoor | Confirm the right equipment is at the right stand on time |
| Fluid carts (oxygen, nitrogen, fuel drain) | 90 | Smart tracker | GPS + zones | Compliance monitoring, usage logbook, unauthorised-loan alerts |
| Tire change & specialised carts | 130 | Smart tracker | GPS outdoor | Deploy the right cart to the right aircraft type |
| Hangar equipment (engine washer, tire carts) | 150 | Location tag | Indoor zones | Zone-level location inside the hangar where GPS can’t reach |
Locating equipment outdoors solved one half of the problem. The other half was inside the hangar, where roughly 20,000 m² of line-maintenance space swallows tire carts, engine washers and tools. Not stolen, just misplaced.
SkyRamp fitted indoor equipment with compact location tags and marked the hangar into zones with geobeacon. When a technician needs a specific engine washer, they open the platform, see the zone it was last detected in, and walk straight to it. What used to be a 30-minute search becomes a few minutes.
Elias’s team used to start every shift on the radio. Now the Sensolus platform does the heavy lifting, generating automatic alerts on configurable rules, so operations only step in when something actually needs acting on.
Automatic notification when a unit enters or leaves a stand, hangar or restricted area, confirming position without a manual check-in.
Alert when a unit sits outside its assigned zone or goes unused for too long, flagging equipment that should be redeployed.
If a unit appears where airport regulations don’t allow it, the team is alerted immediately to bring it back into compliance.
Equipment leaving its home area without authorisation triggers an alert, with the full location trail preserved to reconstruct any incident.
Infrastructure-free deployment. Hardware built for the apron. A decade of battery life. Everything else flows from these three.
Self-contained trackers work indoors and outdoors with no gateways, no wiring and no changes to the airfield. Condor Technik went from delivery to full visibility in a two-day rollout, a critical edge where every modification airside is complex and tightly controlled.
Weather-resistant trackers built for non-powered assets on an exposed apron, with IATA-compliant automatic flight shutdown for equipment that travels by air. As TCR International puts it: “the best product in the market… very rugged.”
Up to 5–10 years of battery life per tracker. No charging stations, no swap-out cycles, no maintenance overhead, just equipment that keeps reporting, year after year.
The questions airport, airline and ground-handling operations leaders ask us most when they start evaluating GSE visibility.
No. Sensolus trackers work out of the box over public low-power cellular and GPS networks, no gateways, no receivers, no wiring, and no changes to the airfield. That’s how Condor Technik fitted its Frankfurt fleet and went live in a two-day rollout.
Inside hangars, geobeacon wireless zone markers or Sensolus Bluetooth (BLE) location tags add indoor visibility; the tags are picked up by smart gateways placed in the building, or by existing third-party devices that act as a smart gateway.
Yes. Outdoors and on the apron, GSE is located via GPS. Indoors — for example across LOTAMS’ 20,000 m² of hangar space — GeoBeacon zone markers and Sensolus Bluetooth (BLE) location tags provide zone-level location where GPS can’t reach. It all lands on one platform, so a unit is found in seconds instead of hours of searching.
Yes. Trackers are weather-resistant and designed for non-powered assets that live outdoors in all conditions. TCR International chose Sensolus for exactly this reason: “It is the best product in the market. Very rugged trackers with a battery life of up to five years.”
Depending on configuration and reporting frequency, Sensolus trackers are engineered for up to 5–10 years of battery life — the Condor Technik deployment uses trackers rated for ten years. There are no charging stations, no swap-out cycles and no maintenance overhead: they’re fit-and-forget for the working life of the equipment.
Deployments are typically live within days, not months, because there’s no airfield infrastructure to install or approve — Condor Technik completed its rollout in two days. Visibility benefits appear immediately: knowing where every unit is, ending the drive across the field, and cutting the time spent searching from hours to seconds, as LOTAMS did to save around two hours a day.
Yes. Beyond ground support equipment, the same platform tracks other mobile airport assets that tend to go missing across a large terminal, and passenger wheelchairs are one we often see. They’re passenger-service equipment rather than GSE, but the approach is the same: a compact tracker or Bluetooth (BLE) location tag reports the wheelchair’s position, so staff find a free one near the gate in seconds instead of walking the terminal to look for it. It’s the same airport asset tracking, applied beyond GSE.
Yes. Sensolus exposes location, zone, usage and movement data through a REST API and can stream events to your maintenance, fleet or ERP systems. Digital logbooks capture how each unit is used, so accountability and incident reconstruction show up where your teams already work.
Whether you're managing a few dozen dollies or a fleet of 1,000+ units across multiple airports, let's talk about what full visibility could look like for your operation.
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