AIRPORT
THE STATE OF THE AUSTRALIAN AIRPORT SECTOR by Eliza Booth, Associate Editor, Monkey Media
COVID-19 impacted multiple industry sectors, but one of the hardest hit was the airport industry. During the recent State of Play Virtual Conference, part of the 2021 Critical Infrastructure Summit, James Goodwin, CEO of the Australian Airports Association, took part in a panel discussion on the current state of the infrastructure industry, and discussed in depth how the airport industry has coped with, and learnt valuable lessons from, the current situation. 2020: A YEAR OF CHALLENGES The Australian Airport Association is the national organisation that represents the interest of over 330 airports and aerodromes across Australia, covering both small regional airstrips and major domestic and international gateways. During the Critical Infrastructure: State of Play conference panel discussion, Mr Goodwin said that throughout the pandemic one of the major things that has become clear is just how critical airports are, and that even while passenger numbers are down, airports still play a major role. This includes in the freight industry, helping repatriate tens of thousands of Australians, assisting essential workers travel, and shipping vital personal protective equipment (PPE) to where they are needed the most. “Despite the passenger numbers being down, essential freight has needed to come in and out of the country, and we’ve needed to get essential workers around the country, particularly in hotspots, the military, medical professionals and so on,” Mr Goodwin said. “We’ve needed airports to do that [and] we’ve stayed open to allow that to occur. It's an interesting reminder that not every aircraft is full of holiday makers; that we still need the critical infrastructure of airports to be able to maintain the country and the economy as we do.”
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June 2021 // Issue 19
CHANGES IN THE INDUSTRY Over the past year it has become clear that the airport industry has gone through drastic changes as Australia – and the world – continue to battle and recover from the pandemic. Mr Goodwin said that during the worst month of COVID-19 in Australia, approximately April 2020, domestic passenger numbers were down by 95 per cent – a staggering amount. Mr Goodwin said that this clearly showed that airports needed to do more to ensure they had other revenue options besides passengers that they could rely on during hard times. “I think what we’ve seen is that certainly critical infrastructure and airports can’t rely just on aeronautical revenue. We saw that international passenger numbers are down 98 per cent. “It was very clear that airports need to make sure that they’ve got other revenue streams, that there are other parts of their business that they can rely on and diversify to make sure that they can continue to operate to provide that essential, critical infrastructure of the airfield. “For instance, one capital city airport had 19 passengers come through the terminal in the 20 hours that they were open. So that highlights how uneconomical it was to be even operating that airfield, but for those 19 passengers that was critical that they were able to enter and leave that capital city.
“We need to look to the future, but we need to make sure there [are] other forms of business revenue, other forms of infrastructure that we can rely on to make sure that those airfields were able to stay open.” Another area of change for airports is the uptake of technology, which has been further highlighted through the pandemic. “Airports are going to be a different look and feel down the track and we’re already starting to see that. So being able to check in online, QR codes, and all of those sorts of things to make it easier and to stop queuing up, that’s what we're also going to see – technology will take over some of those things down the track,” Mr Goodwin said.
THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY “The sector has been doing it tough, losing about $320 million a month in lost revenue. But what I would say is the people in the sector are doing it tougher, and we thank them for being so resilient and staying with the sector,” Mr Goodwin said. www.infrastructuremagazine.com.au
