Analysing and modelling airport resilience: Robustness, vulnerability and recoverability

Airports have been relatively frequently impacted by various internal and external disruptive events. These have generally affected their operations and consequently their regular/nominal performances. The level of nonaffected performances has indicated the resilience or robustness of airports to the impacts of disruptive events. Thanks to the undertaken contingency measures the time of recovering the affected performances to their regular/nominal level has been considered as recoverability, or rapidity. This paper develops a methodology for assessing the resilience of an airport affected by a given large-scale disruptive event. The methodology consists of models of resilience and models of indicators of the airport’s operational, economic, social and environmental performances used as the figures of merit for assessing resilience. The methodology is applied to assessing the resilience of a large European airport (London Heathrow) impacted by a large-scale global external disruptive event — the COVID-19 pandemic — as being specific compared to the others such as bad weather, terrorist threats/attacks, failures of the system components and the industrial actions of air transport industry staff. The results indicate that during both past short-term and future medium-term periods, the inherently mutually interrelated airport performances expressing losses of profits of the particular actors/stakeholders have and are expected to be significantly affected. Those expressing savings in costs/externalities have and are expected to only fragmentary compensate these profit and losses under given conditions.