Expect the Unexpected: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic for the Future of Airport Leaders and Managers

Introduction

Before the pandemic, the aviation industry had showed consistent growth in number of passengers at a global level (Mazareanu, 2020). In the first quarter of 2020, the scenery for the aviation industry was optimistic and promising with a 4.1% increase in demand, until the pandemic hit mid-March of 2020 (Mazareanu, 2020).

Airports are highly oriented towards safety and security structures, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001 which resulted in increased security procedures and screening of passengers, luggage, etc. (Blalock et al., 2007). Standard procedures state that each airport should have a preparedness plan that must include information about the type of “communication with the public, screening, logistics (transport of travelers to health facilities), equipment, entry/exit controls, and coordination with the local/regional/national public health authority” (ACI, 2009). Therefore, airport authorities strive to be “one step ahead” and have a plan for any of the possible scenarios that might occur.

Airport and airline safety managers have a set of procedures for each kind of foreseeable emergency, but because crisis follow no one patter, those plans must be highly adaptable to the dynamic nature of situations (Enoma et al., 2009).

On the 11th of March 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic (WHO, 2020a) due to the extent it was affecting the health and putting in risk the global population.

Consequently, countries started closing borders and nearly all international travel was halted, leaving people all over the world in a state of uncertainty, sometimes near panic trying to return to their home countries (Alper & Bloom, 2020). An unprecedented crisis in air travel all over the world ensued, with an inordinate amount of people flooding the airports to get a passage home, often ignoring safety and security indications from organisms of different natures in society.

Some of the main challenges that air travel management had to face during the COVID-19 pandemic were trying to follow as strictly as possible the safety and health rules, manage the cancelled or delayed flight passengers that were waiting to be sent back to the country of origin, storage of airplanes that were no longer flying because of the pandemic conditions, and shifting the handling division to a more cargo-oriented traffic (IATA, 2020b).

In the aftermath of COVID19 the aviation sector is reported to have taken one of the biggest hits economically speaking (IATA, 2020b). In this context, airport management had to face a lot of challenges including the effectiveness of the health safety, assuring that the passengers feel safe and trust the airport management and staff, certifying that the handling capacity is maintained and finding an optimum strategy to be financially efficient and not to limit the passenger flux (Airport Research Center, 2020).

As crisis will be less predictable and more serious, the airport community needs to be able to adapt at an even greater speed, to quicky evaluate past events and constantly improve contingency plans, to better tackle the next crisis. It is arguable that the COVID-19 pandemic was paradigm-shifting and a herald of forthcoming crisis that are bound to be ever more eminent due to risks like terrorism, extreme weather events from climate change, as well as other pandemics or epidemics (European Commission, 2019).

In the aftermath of these paradigm-shifting events, it is important to understand how these critical issues have been dealt with and what were the key elements for success and failures in dealing with this unexpected crisis situation and what are the lessons to be learned from this situation for the future crisis, which is what this chapter proposes to do.

Because of the nature of this theme and its specificities, semi-structured interviews based on the critical incidents technique were conducted with managers of the Portuguese and Romanian airports. The goal was to study specifically the first wave of COVID19 and see how this event was coped with and how disruptive contexts can be best dealt with. The study will explore a major gap in the literature, as most of the studies are focused on airline companies and pilots, and few attentions is given to the airports and the airport management.