The woman who built calm out of chaos

The call came from Terminal A: a young child had wandered away from a parent. In the past, the report might have bounced between terminals at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) by radio and phone, precious minutes lost. Inside the new Integrated Coordination Center (ICC), it unfolded differently. The dispatcher logged the call, gate control flagged nearby staff and TSA supervisors stepped into the shared room to compare camera feeds. On the wall of screens, an interactive map of the terminal lit up with the child’s last known location. Within minutes, the child was found safe, reunited with family and the disruption faded back into the airport’s daily rhythm. For Cheryl Hamilton, watching it play out from her console, the moment was proof that the ICC was built for more than crises, it was built for people.

The new Airport Operations Center (AOC) inside the Integrated Coordination Center (ICC) for Bush Airport

She remembers when the job ran on carbon paper. “When I first started in emergency communications, dispatchers had a form,” says Cheryl Hamilton, division manager of the Airport Operations Center at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH). “You would write things out and mark them with a timestamp. Every entry. Every call. You’re doing that the whole shift. If one incident lasted hours, you ended up with a stack of forms that would need to be filed.”

Over time, the stacks became servers; the handset became a network. The woman who once stamped paper in the dark learned to design light and flow for a new era.

“I’ve been with the City of Houston for over 33 years,” Hamilton says. “I was with the police department for a little over 12 years, then the Houston Emergency Center, and I’ve been with Houston Airports for 21 years. I’ve seen emergency communications evolve.” She pauses, the way veterans do when memory is a muscle. “Tremendously.”

Cheryl Hamilton, division manager of the AOC at IAH for Houston Airports

Hamilton was working dispatch operations on Sept. 11, 2001. “I have a lot of horrible moments,” she says, “but 9/11 really changed the environment of the airport. Security was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.” The profession changed, too. “Back then, if you were on a cellphone, dispatchers did not know where you were. Today, technology has improved so much that we can figure out the general location of that cellphone caller in seconds.”

She has experienced national emergencies collide with local heartbreak. “When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, we did a lot of coordinating. Thousands of people came to Houston,” she says. “I worked closely with the Houston Fire Department to get about 10,000 evacuees from Louisiana to the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. That was a big effort.”

Then came storms with first names, long memories, and marquee events with global stakes. “Super Bowls. Final Fours. Hurricane Harvey in 2017,” she says. “Yes, quite a few.”

Across the country, moments like those have reshaped emergency communication. On 9/11, first responders in New York couldn’t talk across radio systems. During Hurricane Katrina, local and federal agencies struggled to share information. After a 2013 shooting at LAX in Los Angeles, airports everywhere rethought their command centers. Houston Airports studied those failures closely. What emerged is the Integrated Coordination Center (ICC)—a two-story hub at Bush Airport where proximity, shared screens and direct eye contact replace the lag of radios and email chains. Hamilton, who lived those eras firsthand, carried their lessons into her design.

For the public, an airport is gates and jet bridges. For Hamilton, it is a city. “We are a city within a city,” she says. “The Bush Airport Airport Operations Center (AOC) is the number one answering point for EMS calls in the entire city. People don’t know how busy it is. We have car accidents, utility issues and domestic arguments. We deal with what happens on the ground and mid-flight.” The list is blunt and unsentimental: illnesses in the terminal or on approach, falls on escalators and employees who need help. Tens of thousands of workers. A lot happens behind the scenes that the public never sees.

The original AOC at Bush Airport, before it was deactivated in August 2025

About two years ago, Hamilton was handed a shell space and a mandate that was both simple and radical — make the airport think faster together. “I was given the plans for a new dispatch operations and asked, ‘What can you do with this square footage?’” she says. “Technology excites me. I got to work.”

Her blueprint for the new Airport Operations Center (AOC) inside the ICC is less room and more of a nervous system. “My focal point was situational awareness across the board,” she says. “Not only in the ICC, but also in the Emergency Operations Center.” The spine of that awareness is a wall of living glass. “The interactive video walls are my favorite part,” she says without apology. “We need to share information in real time. At the end of each aisle, we have encoder positions. They can push any content to the screens in the ICC, and if something escalates, we can push it down to the EOC. When stakeholders arrive, the information is already there. They can get to work.”

This isn’t tech for tech’s sake. It’s muscle memory engineered into pixels. “People thought, can’t you just put some computer monitors up?” she says with a small laugh. “No. If we want to be cutting edge, if we want to shine in the aviation industry, these are the things we need to do.”

The room talks in color. “Those lights people notice right away. They aren’t just ambiance,” Hamilton says. “Each workstation has a controller that can switch between red, yellow, green and blue. If an operator has something serious, they change it to red. It’s a visual status of that person in that moment. You don’t have to shout across a room.”

The tools extend beyond screens to a platform that treats the field like a front row. “Our incident management system is very robust,” she says. “Field personnel can send video, pictures and notes. We’ll have one place where all the information lives.”

The genius of the new AOC isn’t only its feeds and encoders. It’s the way the room cares for the people inside it. “The human comfort in a dispatch center is very important,” Hamilton says. “You’re looking at monitors all day. Light on the screen and light in the room is hard on your eyes. It creates headaches and fatigue.” So the space fights fatigue on purpose. “We have task lights at each position. They’re dimmable. Desks go up and down. Fans. Ergonomics. Creature comforts. If you take care of your people, your people will take care of you.”

She designed it for doubles and disasters. “We work eight-hour shifts, but you work doubles when needed, or when the mayor activates emergency operations. We even built showers,” she says, practical as a checklist. “That’s always been the thing. In an emergency, dispatchers need to stay. Now they don’t have to sit there wishing.”

The AOC is still lean by any measure. “We built 20 positions,” she says. “We run 24/7. People take off, people get sick. I had three senior operators retire. We do a lot out here.” The operator skepticism that greeted the move is gone. “They wondered why we needed all this,” she says, smiling. “They’re the main ones now showing visitors, look what it can do.”

The power of the ICC isn’t just hardware. It’s proximity. “Before, we were in Terminal A. Gate control was in Terminal D,” Hamilton says. “We talked by phone or email. Now, we can see the big picture.” TSA sits nearby, in a room of its own for regulatory reasons, yet one glass wall away. “They have the same equipment and their own encoders,” she says. “If there’s a security situation, they can push it to the other walls.”

Collaboration — which used to depend on luck and discipline — now lives in the floor plan. “Right now, even with a few small incidents, communication is immediate,” she says. “TSA can step out and tell us what’s happening. We’re waiting for terminal operations, HPD and TSA to have people on the floor every day. When that happens, we’ll really see the benefit.”

Ask Hamilton what the traveling public should know and she doesn’t reach for drama. She reaches for the truth. “We’re busy,” she says. “We have the same incidents I had as a police dispatcher. The same urgency. Even more urgency at times because of federal guidelines.” The room exists so the public never has to know it exists. “You don’t want people thinking about the AOC,” she says with a wry laugh. “That means it’s smooth sailing. But we’re here.”

She measures success in seconds saved and stories straight. “People are here, there and everywhere,” she says. “You tell a story to one person, by the time it gets to the 10th, it’s a whole other story. I wanted an environment where we could work together and have accurate, on-time information and real situational awareness.”

Cheryl Hamilton never planned to be the person airports call when they want a room to think. “Who would’ve thought a police dispatcher would be designing a center for an airport system,” she says. “I could barely type when I started.” She learned by doing. “I worked on a lot of projects within Houston Airports. Mostly IT, some construction. A lot of the software we use today, I was on those project teams.”

The arc from handset to encoder is personal. “It’s an honor to leave a legacy for the next Cheryl Hamilton,” she says. “You can grow in this field.” She knows the day she retires will be bittersweet. “I feel like I’m walking away from my baby,” she says, then grins. “But I’ll answer if you call.”

Until then, she’s still at the console, calibrating the future to the tempo of real life. “We were ready in the old place,” she says. “We’re really ready now.” The proof is practical. “Faster response. Better collaboration. The video walls are key. We used to have monitors on a wall, but we couldn’t push information to different places. Now we can.”

Airport Director Jim Szczesniak logs into an AOC computer

The Houston Airports director of aviation stopped by recently. “Jim Szczesniak sat at a position,” Hamilton says. “He had the mouse, moving things. I told him we have extra openings,” she adds, laughing. The joke lands because the system works. Inside a city within a city, a room watches and listens and thinks, built by a woman who knows that knowing each other is as critical as knowing the data.

Most passengers who passed through Terminal A that day never knew a parent had lost track of their child. They never saw the screens inside the ICC flash red, the calls exchanged in seconds or the map that guided staff to a reunion. That is the point. The Integrated Coordination Center was designed so that disruption fades before it ripples, so families make their flights and so travelers remember Houston for its welcome, not its emergencies. For Cheryl Hamilton, that quiet anonymity is success.

Technology made the AOC smarter. Cheryl Hamilton made it human.