With ground operations still reeling from the ongoing staffing crisis, substantial effort is being made to digitalise and improve the efficiency of this vital part of the aviation picture. To understand more of the challenges facing the industry in 2024 on a strategic level, we sat down with trade associations, airports and ground handlers.
From the airports perspective, Yuliia Moravej from Airports Council International (ACI) World tells us that “there are two overarching challenges faced by the entire aviation industry, including airports: managing growth and the sustainability agenda. These challenges highlight the significance of airports prioritising sustainability, efficiency, and innovation to foster a future that is environmentally friendly and customer-driven.”
On the sustainability side, ACI Europe is seeing success from the ACI Airport Carbon Accreditation, with nearly 600 airports participating. Where quick wins are possible — such as moving from fossil fuel to electric equipment, installing sustainable energy sources, and so on — they are being undertaken. At the same time, research and development are underway for the changes required by lower emissions aircraft, including sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen power, and advanced air mobility battery-powered aircraft.
More widely, Moravej notes, “to effectively handle this growth and meet the evolving expectations of passengers, airports must focus on enhancing operational efficiency. Embracing digitalisation, technology innovation, and automation can help optimise processes and improve the overall passenger experience.”
New technologies, systems, integrations and ways of working will be crucial to ensure that these changes are delivered as efficiencies rather than just seen as cost-cutting measures.
From the ground handling perspective, Airport Services Association managing director Fabio Gamba concurs, telling us that “there are many technological innovations taking place right now. Not all of them will pass the test and will find their way through, but right now ground handling is experiencing a profusion of ideas and very promising innovations like never before.”
Digitalisation is showing much promise within ground handling, but as with any industry these new improvements can be costly up front.
“Digitisation and automation are indeed an important way to offset the difficulties, in a labour-intensive sector as is ours, related to hiring new skills,” Gamba says. “But for true innovation to really play this positive role, the system must give ground handlers the means to allow for more research and development, and to purchase these new concepts. Right now it doesn’t have them and many of these promising concepts will either be delayed or simply ignored.”
Within this context, new industry standards can reduce complexities, costs and hazards — a win-win-win for aviation. But implementation of standards has not always been as swift as is needed to ensure that these benefits can be realised.
“Unfortunately,” Gamba says, “it takes an awful lot of time for airlines to internalise and implement standards that have been created more than a decade ago already. In the absence of a — or a very slow — voluntary approach, a regulatory hand will be necessary. This is happening now in some places, notably in the European Union, with EASA about to have a ground handling regulation in place.”
But a key fundamental issue remains in ground handling: that of airlines and airports seeing it as a cost to cut rather than as a key part of their passenger experience service and efficient operations. Lessons about the need to increase the selection focus on quality — most notably taken from the summer 2022 disruptions — have, in some cases, not been learned.
Here, Gamba warns of “a race to the bottom and its corollary, poorly remunerated jobs, difficulty to retain skills, and so on. The same cause creates the same consequences, pre- or post-COVID.”
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