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With a lack of staff causing chaos across the air travel sector post-Covid, digitalisation could be key to helping airports to get back up and running at full capacity, while also future-proofi ng against the issues seen this summer. Not that new technology alone can necessarily hope to solve these challenges, of course. Andrea Valentino talks to insiders at Phoenix and Helsinki airports to understand how staffi ng shortages are impacting their operations, how digitalisation can help and the need for careful planning and better conditions to keep operations running smoothly.
irports can be stressful at the best of times. However, even distinguished maestros of post-9/11 travel would surely have struggled at Gatwick in the summer of 2021. Over a few days at the end of August, Britain’s second airport was reduced to utter shambles. Queues stretched across the terminal, while passengers faced an avalanche of cancelled flights and missed connections. Nor were paying customers the only ones to get frustrated. At the end of May, a WizzAir captain was caught losing his temper over the tannoy, after a flight bound for Cyprus was left stranded on a Gatwick runway for seven hours. “I don’t need this!” he shouted at bemused holidaymakers – even if they presumably appreciated the sentiment.
A Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
To be clear, Gatwick is far from unique here. Across London, passengers at Heathrow were forced to sleep on the floor, even as their bags were piled up on the concourse. In Manchester, the check-in queue snaked out of the terminal altogether, forcing travellers to wait in the car park. Nor is this a purely British problem. Schiphol in the Netherlands was just one of the major European airports to experience similar trouble, with Frankfurt in Germany and Orly in France close behind. And while there are doubtless a range of factors at play here, from mechanical faults on aircraft to IT hiccups, these varied disruptions can equally be understood in a single word: staffing. A particularly pressing issue since the pandemic – aviation lost 2.3 million jobs worldwide during Covid-19 – a lack of workers has caused misery
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