Business View Magazine | May 2021

78 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2021 airports determine what types of projects make sense, particularly when we don’t know when recovery is going to happen or what it’s going to look like. There’s a lot of activity on that front. In some ways, the impact of COVID has helped to accelerate a whole lot of technologies and initiatives that we were looking for prior to the pandemic. This has helped to drive more automation, the use of biometrics, less touches, and less people interaction on the passenger journey.” BVM: How does the landscape look for airports in the future? Schulz: “Our members range from the biggest international airports around the world all the way to remote grass airstrips in Alaska. Recovery is going to be very different for some airports compared to others. For example, a lot of regional airports are already above pre- pandemic travel levels. Southwest have opened up new markets between secondary cities, rather than going through the big hub airports. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. “There’s a lot of opportunity to fix what we have. The average airport facility is 40 years old, so there’s plenty of work to be done. A lot of airports have actually taken advantage of the downtime and accelerated projects because of the reduced traffic. But, the needs are still out there. “The pandemic has shown that this industry is incredibly resilient. The only really big question in the next three to five years is how quickly we’re going to come back. As far as how we travel, I think this is going to facilitate and enhance more control by each individual passenger over the course of their journey – all the way from booking a ticket, to boarding a plane. It will be our mobile phone and our face (biometrics) that will get us through the whole passenger journey. If it’s done right, I think it could be very beneficial.” backlog of work that helped sustain them through last year, as a lot of airports have paused their capital programs, waiting to see what recovery looks like. We will need to see how travel patterns might shift. To a large extent, the industry is just trying to help airports along. During the last recession in 2008, and for a few years after, airports did little to no planning or infrastructure improvements. Then all of a sudden, we were at a point where recovery happened and we were quickly trying to catch up on capacity due to record numbers of travelers. “We’re trying to tell airports how they can move forward with their activities and with their capital programs. This includes helping