CHAPTER 1

The Need for a Vision for Airports

Airports have played a critical role in the development of today’s interconnected global world. For approximately 100 years, airports have served as the gateway to air transportation (Patterson, 2014), although the nature of their role has evolved (National Air and Space Museum, n.d.). In its infancy in the 1920s, air travel supported mail flights and novelty travel for a small number of wealthy adventurers. Airports began serving a larger volume of long-distance travelers in the decades following World War II, although the experience remained too expensive for most travelers. The introduction of passenger jets in the late 1950s created new infrastructure requirements for airports and led to a surge in demand as air travel became significantly more comfortable. Deregulation of airlines in the late 1970s shifted the landscape of demand for air travel yet again, as demand surged further in response to generally more affordable fares and increased service on heavily traveled routes. Growth was not limited to passenger travel; airports have also needed to support the increased use of aviation for cargo transportation, which has been recently buoyed by the rise in online retail and home delivery.

As a result of this growth, today’s airports play a critical role in the U.S. economy. The FAA estimates that aviation directly or indirectly contributed 4.9% of the U.S. gross domestic project in 2019 (FAA, 2022a). This includes the unique and important role filled by general aviation (GA) airports, which contributed a total of $102.1 billion in direct and indirect output in 2019 (FAA, 2022a).

The evolution of airports has been shaped by a variety of forces, including safety requirements, federal funding requirements, airline deregulation, technological advances, and both steady trends and sudden but temporary changes in demand for air transportation. In many cases, airports have been forced to adapt in a somewhat reactionary manner. Airports are likely to continue to face unexpected challenges, but the time is ripe for both a reflection on how the industry got here and a new unifying vision for the future.

This report seeks to provide an ambitious but realistic vision for what U.S. airports might look like in 2050. The intention is that this vision will provide high-level direction and support alignment to the ongoing evolution of the U.S. aviation system over the intervening years. This vision was developed via a series of three workshops held in 2023 with a variety of aviation stakeholders, as described in a separate workshop methodology document (Appendix A). The details of this vision are presented in a narrative form that is intended to provide stakeholders with a more detailed inspiration for what the future might look like. The authors sought to identify the issues, challenges, and opportunities that airports may need to address to achieve this aspirational vision.

A Vision of U.S. Airports in 2050: What and Why?

A vision creates a shared sense of identity and purpose. A vision can serve as a common endpoint around which to orient the actions of various entities, an inspiration to do more than is currently being done, or a statement of shared values. While there are many ways to define a

vision, in this project we defined it as a statement that expresses the identity and purpose of an organization or sector. A compelling vision has the following four characteristics (drawn from Setear et al., 1990). It is

• Credible: relevant and realistic to stakeholders in the field. It should be applicable to the challenges faced by individuals in that sector at various levels;
• Distinctive: specific to the sector’s unique identity and purpose;
• Motivating: not only presenting a positive image but also serving as an inspiration to those in the field; and
• Persistent: widely shared and understood. It will outlast individual changes in leadership.

The following vision was developed based on workshop discussions and agreed on by workshop participants:

The project began with a literature review to provide background on key topics, such as airport governance and funding, planning and environmental issues, aircraft and travel demand, and emerging trends. This foundational review is recorded in a separate annex (Appendix B). Then, the authors developed the vision through an intensive futuring exercise—a method for thinking about the future—led by RAND and supported by WSP USA and Landrum & Brown. The method is not based on developing specific projections, as conventional forecasting models do, but rather on developing a desirable and realistic vision for the future by bringing people with knowledge of a topic together to discuss the future in a structured series of exercises. The futuring exercise consisted of three workshops, with participants from a variety of aviation stakeholders, including airport representatives, airline representatives, state aviation offices, and other groups to think about how airports might function in 2050. Throughout the report, when the authors mention participants, it refers to this group. More information on the futuring process and participants is provided in Appendix A. While the intent of this work is to broadly consider relevant themes and trends facing airports, topics that were both beyond the scope of the literature review and not brought up independently by participants (such as interactions between airports and space travel) are not included in this report.

Following the second workshop, the authors organized the various outputs from the workshops into broad categories and divided them by short-, medium-, and long-term. These include actions and conditions expected to take place or be relevant over three time periods: now through 2030, 2030 through 2040, and 2040 through 2050. The authors provided a version of this categorization to the third workshop for participants to comment.

Table 1 shows the overall outputs from these workshops, along with a snapshot of current conditions.

Organization of This Report

The style of this report is somewhat atypical, as its fundamental purpose is aspirational rather than informational. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are all written in the past tense as though one is looking back on the past from 2050. This stylistic choice is typical in futuring exercises. It reflects the