Airside operations Come rain or shine
The impacts of climate change are already being felt by the aviation industry and will only become more prevalent in the future – from the rising sea levels and temperatures that threaten infrastructure and disrupt operations, to the extreme weather events that occur with increasing regularity. Brooke Theis speaks with Rachel Burbidge, senior policy offi cer of environment and climate change at Eurocontrol; Greg White, director of the Airport Pavement Research Program at the University of the Sunshine Coast; and Amit Bhasin, professor and director of the Centre for Transportation Research at the University of Texas, Austin, to learn about how the industry is set to be affected, and what airports can do to adapt and build resilience to climate change.
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n the summer of 2022, the UK’s Luton Airport made global headlines when its runway ‘melted’ during a heatwave that saw temperatures across Europe break all-time records. The asphalt on the runway began to soften and peel up, causing flights to be cancelled. However, this was not the first instance of extreme weather taking its toll on airport infrastructure, and scientists warn it certainly won’t be the last. From flooding and wildfires to high winds and soaring temperatures, climate change poses a number of challenging conditions for airports, whose efforts to adapt to them are more urgent than ever. According to a 2019 report by ACI World, almost 70% of airport operators said they had already felt the impact of intensifying weather patterns. “Civil- engineering structures, whether these are buildings,
runways or taxiways, are all designed for a finite life, which may be anywhere from 20 to 100 years,” says Amit Bhasin, the professor and director of the Centre for Transportation Research at the University of Texas, Austin. “The challenge that we face is that the environmental conditions used for design are based on historical weather records. So, if the future weather patterns become very different and more extreme compared with the past, our design assumptions are no longer valid – and in some cases, this would mean our structures may fail completely.”
Running hot and cold
Indeed, European airports were not prepared for the temperatures they faced in the summer of 2022 – and similarly, countries that typically don’t experience
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