Airside operations
Airports around the world are unable to cope with the impact of changing weather patterns.
70% $2.6m
ACI World
The cost of a one-day airport closure due to flooding for a
medium-sized airport (30,000–100,000 flights per year). The cost is £15.7m for large airports.
Eurocontrol 36
The estimated percentage of airport operators that said they had already felt the impact of intensifying weather patterns.
freezing temperatures, such as Kuwait, are seeing winter storms leaving ice and snow on runways that were not built to manage it. In places such as the UK and Australia, asphalt runways with a lifespan of 10–15 years are most common, but they use varying stiffness levels depending on their environment, according to Greg White, the director of the Airport Pavement Research Program at Queensland’s University of the Sunshine Coast. Consequently, in Australia, where summer temperatures of 40ºC are likely, runways do not melt the way they did at Luton when the UK surpassed 37ºC. “You can engineer the asphalt on the surface of most runways to cater to any climatic requirement – but you can’t make it cover all climatic requirements,” White says, explaining that the formulation in Australia also wouldn’t work in the UK because it would place runways at risk during cold spells. “If temperatures reach 25ºC or even 30ºC, the pavement temperature could reach 50ºC. Asphalt has a softening point of around 50–55ºC, because of a property in the bitumen, so that means it would be past its softening point. You can sometimes see that in roads: if you push the surface on a hot sunny day, you’ll be able to move the stones around. But then if you come back on a cool morning and you try and push it, you can’t – because it has become solid again.” So, if an airport runway were to reach its softened state, the heavy loads it usually accommodates – including planes, fire tankers and refuelling trucks – would cause the surface to become uneven once cooled down. In colder climates such as Canada, warmer temperatures are an issue for a different reason: Canada used to be in the permafrost zone, and is now experiencing freeze-thaw cycles, whereby the runways defrost in the summer and re-freeze in the winter. “As a result, you end up with big lumps in your runway where things have moved around during that process,” says White.
One way to respond to extremely hot and cold conditions is by using a surface with added polymers that accommodate a wider range of temperatures. “It
makes it more expensive, but it will broaden the coldest to the hottest that it would be happy to live in,” explains White; but it is a large undertaking to replace a runway surface. “It typically takes four to eight weeks of work every night to slowly move from one end of the runway to the other.”
Ensuring safety
This could be delayed further as changing weather means runways need to be extended, too. A 2021 Federal Aviation Administration study showed runways at some of the US’s busiest airports may need to be lengthened by at least 500ft as planes require longer take-off distances in hot air (which is thinner than cold) and higher rainfall requires further braking distance. A Climate Change Risks for European Aviation study, conducted by Eurocontrol in 2021, found that flooding from sea- level rise at airports in Europe is also increasingly probable. Two-thirds of coastal or low-lying airports are projected to be at risk of flooding from storm surges by 2090 and face a swell in temporary flooding from heavy, prolonged rainfall. “Runways are very flat, so for airports built only a little bit above the sea level, there’s potential for them to end up underwater,” says White. “If sea-levels rise, they will either need to build the runway up further or find a new runway on higher ground.” The likelihood of such conditions causing an aircraft to crash and people being injured is low due to the many safeguards in place. “But what it does do, in a practical way, is it forces the airport to close the runway until [the problem is] fixed, and that disrupts flights,” says White. Rachel Burbidge, the senior policy officer of environment and climate change at Eurocontrol, concurs. “For passengers, I think the safety risks are minimal – operations would be halted if conditions were unsafe,” she says. “Passengers are more likely to experience frustrations due to impacts to their journey such as delayed, cancelled or even diverted flights.” As stated in a 2020 study by McKinsey, if improvements aren’t made imminently, by 2050 the number of passengers impacted by airport delays will be 23 times higher.
Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
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Shutterstock.com
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