SPECIAL REPORT: SUSTAINABILITY
The new normal?
A handful of architects and consulting companies consider how COVID-19 will impact on the use and future design of airport terminals. Architect: Ricondo Risk, resilience and flexibility Airport operators are looking to the industry for guidance on how future best practices will evolve to promote increased passenger safety, maintain operational efficiency and capacity, and accommodate regional, national, and international health and safety protocols, writes Ricondo vice president, Chad Townsend. The long-term airport planning and design (P&D) strategy resulting from COVID-19 should focus on risk, resilience and flexibility. The obvious impact to airport facilities results from social distancing guidelines requiring two to three times the upper range of industryaccepted level of service (LOS) recommendations. The accepted criteria for passenger LOS that determine a facility programme have evolved alongside the aviation industry’s innovations and security protocols to promote a balance among the passenger experience, operational efficiency, and fiscal realities of an ultracompetitive commercial environment. Given the existing constraints at most airports and the financial effects of COVID-19 on the global aviation industry, proposing significant increases to the size of typical airport facilities to accommodate temporary guidelines associated with this specific pandemic is not a feasible solution. Further, dramatically altering current P&D metrics should not be the long-range strategy. Instead, the focus should be on
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AIRPORT WORLD/ISSUE 5, 2020
preparing our facilities and operating protocols to be as resilient as is financially feasible. Early P&D processes should include identifying potential threats, including health, weather, geologic, and security, and gauge the probability of occurrence while developing project criteria that prioritise resilience and flexibility to accommodate common challenges. The subsequent evaluation of alternative solutions should place equal emphasis on spatial and functional flexibility, operational resiliency, and fiscally responsible accommodation of risk scenarios, as is currently placed on initial construction cost. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis has been a tool for evaluating concept solutions for decades. In the context of the P&D process resulting from COVID-19, the SWOT analysis should consider the following: lessons learned from the pandemic, which will evolve our priorities when evaluating capital improvements and operational enhancements; the benefit-cost of risk preparedness and resiliency versus minimum standards; and the common solutions regarding operational needs and responses for the multitude of events that could affect an airport’s ability to stay operable and efficient under periodic, and not just generational irregular and challenging conditions. With an evolution of early visioning, reprioritising evaluation criteria and a more robust benefit cost strategy that includes downside scenarios, airport operators can proactively identify risks and develop solutions to ensure airports remain resilient and flexible.
