Congratulations Anushka!

Congratulations to our Senior Airport Planner Anushka Padhye who passed her Heathrow airside driving test recently which is great news for AiQ. This increases the team’s capacity to deliver surveys, so it’s a good job we added to our EV fleet earlier this year! Special thanks to our friends at Cobalt Ground Solutions for their help with the test.

Top four priorities for airports and stakeholders in the next 5 years

The aviation industry is now four years on from the pandemic and airports and stakeholders have moved on from worries about demand with their focus now pivoting back to the long-standing issue of capacity. One of our priorities at AiQ is helping airports with the challenges this issue brings and consulting with their planning and operational teams so that they can effectively manage capacity issues over the next few years and capitalise on the return to and surpassing of pre-pandemic passenger levels.

So what will drive capacity over the next 5 years? Our observations are that the following factors will be significant:

  1. Passenger behaviour and trends
  2. Automation
  3. Biometrics and digital identity
  4. Sustainability and Net Zero

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AiQ update

After another action-packed 12 months for aviation, as well as for AiQ and our clients, we thought it might be useful to detail some of the projects we are involved with to provide some scope on the range of work we can undertake.

We continue to work for a variety of airports including HeathrowSchiphol, Bristol, Newcastle, Newquay and Farnborough. Our work at Heathrow is across a wide range of programmes, in fact we are involved with 4 of the 6 current H7 programmes:

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Passenger demand and capacity expertise

With record-breaking passenger numbers predicted to be moving through airports this year, the efficiency of their journey is a key consideration for AiQ’s work with airports throughout the world.

As global experts in constrained and saturated airports, we approach the capacity and the operation with not only a scientific approach to big data, but also with a strong emphasis on the passenger journey and experience.

There are lots of different things that need to be considered when you’re looking at passengers at an airport.

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Christmas charity donations

Instead of sending Christmas cards this year we have donated to two very worthwhile charities, you can find out more about them below.

Magic Breakfast are a brilliant charity who ensure that no child in their partner schools is too hungry to learn by providing healthy breakfast food as well as expert support to help identify and reach those pupils at risk of hunger. A hungry child cannot concentrate so could miss out on half a day of lessons every school day if not given anything nutritious to eat first thing.

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AiQ scoops Net Zero Heathrow Supplier Award 2023!

AiQ are very proud to be named as winners of the SME Net Zero award at the Heathrow Supplier Awards 2023. AiQ provide aviation consultancy including operations, optimisation and modelling to Heathrow and this industry accolade recognises and celebrates their efforts in helping to achieve Heathrow’s strategic aims and their plan for sustainable growth Heathrow 2.0.

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Airport Demand Forecasting

In our previous blog we identified that in 2024 Airport Capacity Planning will once again be an issue for Airport Operations for the first time since the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. In 2024 passenger volumes are predicted to recover to 2019 levels.

While Demand Forecast Planning has not gone away in that period, indeed it has been a constant and very challenging process used to anticipate changing passenger/cargo volumes, it will come into sharp focus as airports once again work at their limits of capacity. It therefore seems timely for Airports to re-evaluate this fundamental process to check it is fit for purpose.

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Continued Airport Recovery – a look ahead to 2024 and beyond

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic as the aviation industry moves towards the end of 2023, not least that it is expected to finally reach a profit this year for the first time since the pandemic.

ACI World Airport Traffic Forecasts 2022-2041:

  • Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global passenger traffic dropped from 9.2 billion in 2019 to 3.6 billion in 2020, and then recovered to 4.6 billion in 2021, and 6.5 billion in 2022. Over the next five years, traffic is expected to recover from 4.6 billion to 11.0 billion. (See chart below) This equates to a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.0% over the 2021–2026 period.
  • It is predicted that in 2024 global airport passenger traffic will return to the volume observed in 2019. Passenger traffic worldwide is expected to reach 19.3 billion in 2041 and 23.9 billion in 2050.

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