Biography|Arnaud Feist — The Compass Offices That Moved the Operator Back Into the Terminal

For years the operator's staff sat off to the side of the field.

On 9 September 2022, Brussels Airport Company's own account said the official move into Compass had begun.

The building is not a distant HQ. Signum+ Architects, who designed it with Tractebel, place it on the tarmac side of the terminal, between the 1958 Skyhall and the early-1990s New Terminal, a block about 100 metres by 50.

The first reason for the pile was baggage, not desks. European Standard 3 screening rules required a new handling and screening system. That plant, on the underground and ground floors, went live on 15 June 2021.

Floors +2 to +4 were built to the same structural grain as the New Terminal and filled with non-public airport functions. Five office floors sit above them, looking at the runways.

The top three of those floors became the company head office in September 2022. The architects put the budget near 50 million euros and the floor area near 38,000 square metres. Construction ran from 2016 to 2022.

The name came from staff. The company said colleagues offered 47 suggestions; Compass won the vote. The posted gloss was Latin com for together and passus for step.

Feist had already been chief executive for twelve years when the keys turned. The move did not change the title. It changed where the title sat: inside the passenger machine instead of beside it.

A visitor cannot walk the office floors. The pin is the public terminal that Compass was built into, the same building line a passenger uses at departures level +3, near row 10.

The registered seat of the company later moved again, to Topos Merode in Etterbeek. Compass remains the operating home on the field.

Photo: Nenea hartia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons