AENA: more than 2,000 LIMIT stanchions for the national airport network

AENA runs the Spanish airport network, and a network means the same solution has to work identically at an airport handling two million passengers and at one handling sixty thousand. The brief was the supply of more than 2,000 LIMIT retractable belt stanchions with a corporate green belt. It is the largest project in Dlimit’s history.

The model installed was the LIMIT model, the base stanchion of the Dlimit collection, the brand’s premium range: stainless steel base 36 cm in diameter weighing 8 kg, a 3.7 m belt and a head certified for 200,000 cycles. These are laboratory figures, not marketing ones. In a space with constant traffic the base withstands lateral pull of up to 15 kg without tipping, which is the difference between a stanchion that stays where you put it and one that has to be repositioned every morning.

The belt was produced in AENA's corporate green, in deliberate contrast with the finish of the tube. The colour is applied by CMYK dye sublimation, bonded into the fibre rather than laid on top, so it neither wears away as the belt retracts nor fades under light. The same process allows wording or a logo to be added later without changing the stanchion.

On an order of this size the hard part is not manufacturing: it is making unit two thousand identical to unit one. Coating, belt shade and head tension are controlled batch by batch at the Mataró plant, because across a network the stanchions from one airport and those from another end up sharing a terminal as soon as stock is redistributed.