The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an existential public health and economic crisis for the airport system. An interview study was conducted using Amsterdam Airport Schiphol as a use case to prepare for future public health disruptions. The study aimed to uncover key experiences and lessons learned by an airport system during the COVID-19 pandemic by interviewing 16 experts from airport operators, airlines, public health agencies, security services, and the government. After thematic analysis, four themes emerged. The first theme addressed the limited readiness of the airport system; the COVID-19 pandemic seemed unimaginable regardless of prior experiences with infectious diseases or weak signals. The second theme depicts an airport system running behind the facts, one that had difficulties implementing operational interventions and had to deal with extensive reorganisations. The third theme illustrated the complex relational dynamics within the airport system, such as the hesitancy of public health stakeholders towards aviation stakeholders and the government utilising a top-down approach. Finally, theme four provides lessons learned for the future whereby actively fostering a systemic approach, sensemaking capabilities, and informal relations are recommended. Current constructions like Crisis Management Teams and the Airport Operations Centre support these learnings. Further reflection and operationalisation of the study's findings are critical to proactively supporting the airport system's transition from a potential pandemic liability to a strategic asset in mitigating public health disruptions.@en

This poster presents the “Accelerating Innovation” programme, a set up for three PhD research projects that was created within the collaboration between the Royal Schiphol Group and the Industrial Design Engineering faculty of the TU Delft. With this collaboration, researchers from the IDE faculty were engaged in three challenges: (1) designing towards pandemic antifragility in Multimodal Transport Hubs (MTHs); (2) transforming Airport Hubs into passenger-oriented MTHs, and (3) investigating the adoption of autonomous processes in the context of organizations. An action research methodology is followed in the projects, meaning that the researchers are embedded in the organization, and actively participate in daily practice. This poster presents the scope of the three projects, as well as the studies and academic supervision tasks that the researchers have undertaken until now; we hope to contribute with an example of action-research oriented PhD projects, which could serve to ilustrate transdisciplinary research perspectives. @en

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the existential public health and economic fragilities of the civil aviation industry. To prevent future public health disruptions, the civil aviation industry is gaining interest in becoming more “resilient” but rarely elaborates on its meaning, hampering decision-making and strategy development. When looking into the academic literature it seems that a proliferation of resilience-related concepts occurred. Although enriching resilience, it also dilutes its meaning and reduces its use for practice. This paper aims to create concept clarity regarding resilience by proposing a categorization of resilience. Based upon a scoping review, this categorization dissects resilience into four reoccurring aspects: fragility, robustness, adaptation, and transformation. This categorization is expected to support sensemaking in disruptive times while assisting decision-making and strategy development on resilience. When applying this categorization in the civil aviation and public health context, the transformative aspect seems underused. Further research will focus on maturing the categorization of resilience and its use as a sensemaking tool.@en

The outbreak of COVID-19 demonstrated the fragility of the transportation system and its Multimodal Transport Hubs (MTHs). Global travel reduced dramatically, leading to an existential crisis in MTHs. To cope with the pandemic, MTHs implemented multiple resilient measurements including social distancing, rapid testing regimes, and infrared cameras. Although these measurements are valuable tools, this research advocates to transcend resilient measures and move towards antifragility by applying a systems thinking approach. As Nassim Taleb (2013) defines: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” Our goal is to contribute to a long-term future of the transportation system by transforming MTHs into a tool to effectuate antifragility during the management of health disruptions.@en