A couple of years ago, Airside International talked with Angela Gittens, the director general of Airports Council International (ACI), the trade body representing airports around the world. She recently spoke to Airside again, to discuss what has changed over those two years and what her priorities are today
ACI’s two priorities today can be seen in terms of the twin issues of capacity and efficiency, Gittens explains. With regard to the former, despite the economic woes of the last few years, air passenger numbers have continued to rise. The rate of growth may have slowed a little as people reined in their spending, but they continue to fly in ever increasing numbers, despite financial constraints, geographical instabilities and regional conflicts, Ebola and whatever else the world can throw at them.
It’s a trend that looks set to continue for many years yet, as the number of people loosely regarded as forming the middle classes goes on rising – that is, individuals with money to spend on air travel and the need or desire to do so. “So, just about everywhere, there is a capacity crunch,” says Gittens, pointing to the challenges that so many gateways face to handle the ever-increasing demands for air service through their facilities.
“Europe has really fallen behind,” not keeping up with the constant need to expand airport capacity, she continues. The process that the UK has been going through to decide whether to build an entirely new hub airport or to expand at one of the London gateways is indicative of that. Frankfurt-Main, Germany’s busiest airport, also faced a massive task in obtaining approval just for another runway. However, even the European policy-makers are seeing the difficulties and the challenge now, Gittens believes, so there is some hope that this capacity issue might be addressed more effectively going forward.
While in Western Europe the problem has been something of a policy issue leading back to the political decision-makers, in North America it has at times been the lack of available finance to build new gateways or develop existing ones. Into the capacity gap are stepping other regions and their hub airports.
The Middle East is once again fulfilling its role as a link between East and West, Gittens observes, and the news confirmed that in 2014 Dubai International overtook London Heathrow as the world’s busiest airport for international passenger traffic sent some shockwaves through both the aviation community, and political decision-makers, she believes.
Asia is doing its best to cope with the rapidly increasing demand for air services, but in places just can’t build airports fast enough. Nevertheless, many of the Asian economic powerhouses rightly regard their airports as real engines for growth, and are putting the aviation industry at the heart of their economic strategies.
There is no reason why what has been, always will be – the Middle Eastern gateways, and the big Asian airports, are investing in their infrastructure, growing their facilities, and attracting more air services and more passengers and cargo – some of it, possibly, at the expense of the big Western hubs we are used to seeing lead the traffic charts. Capacity constraints remain a challenge facing large numbers of the world’s airports, however, and they are meeting it with varying degrees of success.
EFFICIENCY
The second priority to which Gittens points as being the subject of ACI focus is efficiency, and the related issue of quality of service provision. Airports rightly regard themselves as in competition, perhaps with other regional airports, certainly with other modes of transport. They need to be efficient to survive – and, of course, to grow.
Moreover, airlines are becoming stronger, wielding more influence, and airports are competing for their flights. The carriers can strike a hard bargain, and individual gateways need to be efficient to be competitive. They can only do this by keeping their costs down and offering their customers a high quality of service.
To improve their bottom line, airports have also turned en masse to other, non-aeronautical, sources of revenue – primarily the retail sector. To do this effectively, each gateway must again look to efficiency and a high quality of service, in this case providing the level of service that travellers require from their airport shopping (or eating, drinking and so on) experience.
“We at ACI are helping airports to help their customers and to become more efficient,” Gittens informs. Key to that is offering the right tool kit, she says, and a central plank of this effort concerns help and advice on not only providing information and statistical data, but offering protocols on how airports can collect and better use data.
By offering protocols on how relevant data can be assembled and shared by all links in the aviation supply chain, ACI is very much involved in pushing greater collaborative decision-making, an important part of many airports’ strategies to make better use of their infrastructure and facilities by optimising their operational efficiency. ACI is also working with other trade bodies on this. For example, a memorandum of understanding signed by Gittens with Tony Tyler, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in October 2013 on future co-operation between the two trade bodies, paved the way for a number of separate annexes that concerned sharing information and improving co-operation in such fields as ground handling, automated border control, passenger security processes and airport security screening.
CARGO
While the focus of most airports will lie in their passenger-related operations, freight also plays an important role in their day-to-day activities, and thus also comes under ACI’s watchful eye. Some of the organisation’s members have promoted themselves as cargo gateways (Belgium’s Liège, for example), while others rely heavily on the constant comings and goings of the express services providers and their parcel volumes (the FedEx hub of Memphis has lost passenger throughput but has the integrator’s massive cargo flows to handle. Other ACI members – Hong Kong and Dubai to name just two – combine the roles of busy passenger and cargo hubs very successfully.
All-cargo services can add further traffic to an airport’s runways, whether in the form of scheduled or charter freighter operations. More freight is carried in passenger aircraft’s bellyholds, and that cargo may just be the difference between a service’s profitability or falling below the red line. And, while many of the world’s big airports are, as we have seen, facing a capacity crunch, other – usually smaller, regional – gateways are faring less well. And, here, cargo might represent an important contributor to airport operations.
Those smaller gateways are losing out to the bigger ones, Gittens explains, as so many more passengers – and thus airlines – expect to travel into the major, conveniently located hub airports. Point-to-point routes are losing out, therefore. Even the low-cost carriers are now looking to fly straight into the hubs. For those gateways losing airlines and losing traffic, airports’ pretty much unavoidably high ratio of fixed costs to revenue leaves them little scope for cutting back in the face of declining demand, and they can quickly fall into the red.
ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURES
Over the couple of years since Airside last spoke to Gittens, the challenge for airports associated with minimising their environmental footprint has continued to grow. Nearly every region of the world has now signed up to what started out as Europe’s Airport Carbon Accreditation programme.
The challenge was at the core of a landmark resolution on Climate Change adopted by ACI Europe’s member airports in June 2008, in which they committed to reduce their carbon emissions with the ultimate goal of becoming carbon neutral. That challenge is now being taken up right across the world but perhaps most noticeably in North America and in the Asia pacific region.
Europe has led the way, not just on reducing carbon dioxide emissions but on all sorts of other on-airport pollutants as well. And, away from chemical emissions, noise reduction remains a key industry concern as well – another focus of the wider environmental lobby as well as concerned citizens living near airports or on airport flight paths. Millions and millions of dollars have been spent by the aviation industry – airports, airlines, aircraft manufacturers – to reduce the noise, but complaints keep coming. “It’s a very personal issue for people,” Gittens explains, and one that is difficult to overcome.
The conflict that arose as a result of Frankfurt’s decision to build a fifth runway was at least in part a result of insistence from local residents that it would mean increased engine noise, and their objections were not overcome even though airport operator Fraport seemed to do just about everything right in regard to consulting with and advising local residents and the wider community. Such objections can have serious ramifications for gateways seeking to expand their infrastructure to satisfy increasing demand for air travel, not least because the complaints of constituents are heard by their elected representatives – who can put up their own barriers to airport development.
Currently mostly an issue for European, North American and what might loosely be termed Western gateways, airports around the world are likely to face noise and wider environmental challenges on a more frequent basis in future, Gittens opines. Whether in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil or any the other many nations seeking to grow their aviation sector, growing middle classes ever conscious of their wider quality of life are likely to become more vocal in their objections to increased noise and/or harmful emissions (although, it can be argued, they are the ones most benefiting from airports’ growth).
THE CHOICE
Political policy makers have a choice, Gittens insists. They can choose to allow and/or promote their airports’ expansion, despite some of these objections – or they are likely to see their gateways fall back in terms of their international competitiveness. Given that airports represent significant engines of economic growth, it is not an unimportant decision to make.
Whether they can or can’t expand as they would like, airports are in any case looking more and more to their competitiveness and their efficiency. ACI is there to help them in achieving this, as well as in continuing to be safe and secure facilities. The amount of complexity in the aviation sector continues to grow, not least because of ever-increasing regulatory requirements, and Gittens is determined to offer ACI as a guide and helper to member airports in their search for efficiency and success.
