One could argue that the main duty of airports is to carry out passenger and cargo services. But besides this, airports are expected to fulfil other critical functions in society. Over the years, airports have been gaining more importance in accommodating non-aviation related disaster response and recovery operations. Examples of these are Port-au-Prince airport in 2010, after the Haiti earthquakes, and San Juan Airport in 2017 after hurricane Maria. Accessibility, open space, large buildings, redundant communications, intermodal access, logistics handling systems and security make airport magnets for many humanitarian stakeholders according to, resulting in airport facilities being used for different purposes during natural disasters.
The earlier mentioned disasters, among others, have highlighted the importance of airports in the immediate disaster response phase and the necessity of further development to expand surge capacity, according to.
Airports can be exposed to various kinds of disasters. Besides the aviation related disasters, a plane crash for example, they can also be subject to non-aviation related disasters. These events can vary in time, magnitude and type.
Non-aviation related disasters can be divided in two types of disasters: natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, and man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks .These events require capacity increase in order to respond efficiently to the disasters, increasing the pressure on the available airport resources as argued by. argues that operations management, airport capacity and flight scheduling are the most essential elements to control in these situations regarding performance.
Most of the airports around the globe focus on enhancing their infrastructure based on ‘normal’ operations.
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By doing this, they are ignoring the importance of infrastructure resiliency. Infrastructure resiliency has been defined as “The ability of an airport to cope with or adapt to stress and enable airports to operate at a satisfactory level and restore quickly”. The importance of infrastructure resiliency in airports is underpinned by (21), stating that providing sufficient infrastructure resiliency accelerates the urban recovery and therefore reduces the time and finances spent in the post disaster phase. To successfully create sufficient infrastructure resiliency, the integration of multiple stakeholders must be considered. Stakeholders are important for the overall business success of the operation. Freeman (2010) has defined a stakeholder as “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organization’s purpose”.
According to , stakeholders can be divided in to internal and external stakeholders. This is challenged by Donaldson and Preston , who argue that stakeholders should be categorized in a more detailed way, as employees, shareholders, government institutions, political groups, customers, investors, communities and trade associations. Besides the fact that managing these stakeholders is important in the infrastructural planning phase, it is also an important factor in all the phases of disaster management. According to Horney, the contribution of stakeholders in disaster mitigation plans can reduce the impact of disasters on the affected region. adds to that by stating that the involvement of stakeholders creates public awareness and motivates the community to take the required action. goes even further in stating the importance of stakeholder management, as he/she argues that airports and their stakeholders rely on each other in order to reach operational discuss in lifesaving operations.
As airports already have a great number of stakeholders to satisfy during normal operations, this amount multiplies during disaster operations. This sudden and unexpected increase in responsibility can lead to bottlenecks in the operation, according to. Disasters require agility and resiliency in operations, resulting in surge-capacity problems. These problems have been studied by. They all argue that in order to cope with this problem, airports must collaborate with logistics service providers, other airports, local businesses, governmental institutions and airline companies. The coordination of the stakeholders during the operational decision phase has been argued as vital, especially in the initial response. The most highlighted points in the literature in this respect where staff trainings, disaster drills, using advanced IT and pre-establishing cooperation agreements.
As mentioned before in this literature review, the planning phase is very important for airports in order to secure sufficient infrastructural resilience. This planning phase consists of determining the layout and locations plans of facilities, runways, storage capacity and parking space within the capacity constraints. defines airport capacity as “the maximum number of operations (both arrival and departure) that can be performed during a fixed time interval at a given airport under given circumstances such as runway configuration and weather conditions”. Determining this capacity is a complicated process, as the decisions made in this process are based on a wide set of variables, such as fleet mix, arrival/departure ratio and airspace factors. These factors are prone to changeability, which negatively affects the complexity of the capacity utilization decisions according to.
The role of airports during the disaster response is vital when other modes of transportation are paralyzed . In these situations, airports become the base from which emergency medical care, carrying of evacuees and aid goods are being fulfilled. Insufficient capacity planning has resulted in problems in the utilization of airport facilities during these situations according to Wu and Ren. Their study shows that most airports has failed to respond successfully to the overwhelming flow of items, people and aircraft because of the limited runway capacity. To cope with these situations successfully in the future, argues that airport planners should take in to consideration the number of emergency workers and disaster victims and the operation cost in order to calculate the airport capacity. This results in a more efficient use of available space in the case of a disaster.
The growth in air transportation over the recent years has increased the demand for higher standards of airport services. One the problems airports face is the scheduling problem. According to, the increasing demand on the limited airport resources by highly interdependent stakeholders makes airport capacity decisions more complicated. The importance of scheduling is highlighted by, who argues that wrong decisions in the planning process leads to long queues on the runways, which leads to delays of aircraft and an increase in energy consumption. 76 also argues that schedule disruptions can lead to further problems in the airport network. The only study done on airport scheduling in disaster time has been conducted by Yang et al. The research was focussed on the relationship between runway capacity constraints and airport scheduling problems in disaster relief operations. As the scheduling problem is an important one, more studies are needed to address the issues from different perspectives and methods.
As mentioned earlier in this literature review, studies have shown that in the past, airports have not been able to function properly in their role as public facility during the initial response phase. Main findings where that the airports where not suitable for medical treatment, electrical power was scarce and that the temporary medical treatment areas were hot and smelly. The low number of trained staff was also regularly mentioned in the literature (22). The mentioned studies mainly focus on natural disasters, but airports can also experience man-made disasters. states that during these types of disasters, decontamination of victims is of major importance. To effectively reach this, airport authorities and emergency medical services should have coordination plans prepared for every scenario that can be thought of. adds to that that having sufficient detection equipment and personal protection equipment for first responders is critical in keeping the number of victims low.
The Main Task of Airports. (2021, Dec 19). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/the-main-task-of-airports/
