How airports responded to COVID-19 and the consequences
The unexpected and dramatic effects of COVID-19 led airports to mitigate the health and economic consequences in their operational processes. Much attention was given to measures such as social distancing, staff protection, crowd prevention in airports and the integration of health certification checks into systems.
But at the same time, airports had to downsize to remain viable and around the world, most suspended or terminated their investments in ongoing development projects. (There were, of course, exceptions such as Oslo, Helsinki, Doha and Singapore International Airports, who decided to capitalise on the downtime to complete their developments faster.)
Unfortunately, as most airports were forced into survivor mode, they were too overwhelmed to foresee the toll their response measures would have on their resources and expertise when operations resumed. And no one was expecting a situation with almost immediately recovered traffic numbers and staff shortage.