Airports have been around for more than a century, and their core purposes haven’t changed. But new technologies are poised to transform both passenger experiences and back-end operations. In six videos, McKinsey experts examine how tech innovations could reshape how airports look, feel, and function in the decades to come.
Seamless check-in
Kelly Ungerman: The airport today, I think we would all say, sometimes feels a little chaotic and crowded—full of friction from the time you pull up to the curb to the time that you board at the gate. The airport of tomorrow will feel very different: frictionless, automated, touchless, and personalized.
Vik Krishnan: The airport of the future will fix the biggest problem of today, which is anxiety. Most people go to an airport and they’re anxious.
Imagine walking into an airport and not waiting in line for anything. Your bags, to the extent that you have to check them, will be picked up by automated devices that can seamlessly deliver them to the aircraft or the baggage-handling system.
Alex Dichter: One of the most stressful parts of the airport experience for most passengers is security. And it’s stressful for many reasons. It’s a little bit dehumanizing, but it’s also a high source of variability. We never know whether we’re going to get through security in three minutes or an hour.
Kelly Ungerman: Security lines are the biggest bottleneck, and one of the biggest friction points in the end-to-end airport journey. In the future, it may not be necessary to stop at all. Biometrics will mean that your face is your new ID. No more physical documents like boarding passes or passports. That is true for check-in, security, and boarding.
Personalized terminals with a wealth of offerings
Alastair Green: I think a lot of forward-thinking airports are going to say, “How can we do more to create a personalized passenger experience?” We all want something very different—not just in how you shop and the items you want to purchase, but even in how you want to have information presented to you.
Kelly Ungerman: When you’re in the terminals, the signage will be completely personalized. The departure screen will know it’s you. Signs that know exactly where you’re going will point you in the right direction—whether to a restaurant, a club, or the gate. It will be in your language, whatever country you’re in. And it will help you navigate from the time you enter the airport until the time you board the flight.
Vik Krishnan: You can see airports helping a ton with wayfinding. For instance, AI can be used to make digital signage in the language of choice of the individual traveler, as opposed to just in two languages: English plus whatever the local language is. AI can digitize and personalize that, and deliver a very specific experience if, say, you want your journey to be entirely in Turkish, German, or whatever your preferred language is.
Alastair Green: I would expect that in the years ahead, the best airports will say, “How can we tailor what is offered in the individual stores to the types of flights that are coming in?” They’ll know the mix of passengers on board and let you preselect certain items. Maybe you’ll buy things that aren’t offered at the airport but are delivered there. So, if you’re landing at an airport in another country and you know you need a plug adapter or you’re missing something from home, you shouldn’t need to walk around the terminal looking for that item. You could prepurchase it on the flight so it’s delivered to you when you land on the other side.
Steve Saxon: Airports fundamentally are a place where people come to board aircraft. However, there are big opportunities for airports to appeal to the local communities as well. I think we’ll see airports become an attractive destination for local people living in the city, as well as people traveling. That will lead to the development of retail, commercial, and business facilities in and around the airport vicinity.
Vik Krishnan: I think an airport has the opportunity to be a convening space for lots of things that don’t necessarily have to do directly with travel. An airport of the future is going to be a place, in some instances, where people want to meet even if they aren’t necessarily flying that day. It will have an immersive experience in lots of very interesting things, whether that’s shopping, world-class restaurants, or experiences that you can enjoy and immerse yourself in without actually having to get on an airplane.
The future of airports: Seamless, automated, and personalized
Automation ‘below the wing’
Vik Krishnan: There’s a lot of work that also happens in an airport “below the wing,” which is the stuff that you don’t see, and that is also going to be significantly changed in the future. I’m very excited by the prospect of AI technologies helping airlines manage the process of turning an aircraft very efficiently.
It is about the belt loader showing up and helping take bags off the airplane. It is the tug that tows the airplane from the ramp onto the gate. It is the service vehicles that help clean an aircraft. It is the catering truck that brings in drinks and food for passengers to enjoy on the airplane.
Much of that will be digitized—and automated in some instances—and delivered in a way that allows for higher reliability and better on-time performance.
Kelly Ungerman: I think there’s a real potential for AI to do better demand planning, so you know exactly where to staff workers, and they show up at the right place at the right time. Another really interesting technology in the context of the airport of the future is autonomous vehicles—to be able to shuttle passengers from one part of the airport to another, or from a large central terminal out to the airplane sitting on the runway. It gives you flexibility to be a lot more modular. I think robotics are interesting, as well. In everything from gate operations to baggage handling to food and beverage delivery, there is opportunity to be much more efficient.
Steve Saxon: There’s a lot of automation possible in airport processes. We have self-driving taxis on the streets of San Francisco, but we still have somebody driving a jet bridge to attach to a plane. Lots of these things—like baggage loading, jet bridges, and passenger buses—will become autonomous.
I don’t think we’ll have long piers with lots of fingers and gates leading out to aircraft. Why do we want to build big buildings, and why do we want to make passengers walk? I instead think we’ll have a fantastic, entertaining central area within the airport and then autonomous shuttles taking people out to board their aircraft just in time for their flight.
More sustainable air travel
Alastair Green: A lot of airports will start to move toward their own on-site green generation, whether that’s a microgrid or even production of hydrogen on-site—things that make the energy equation for the airport as a whole work out better. Another item is SAF, or sustainable aviation fuel. Many airports struggle to figure out the infrastructure to deliver that. Over the next ten years, I would expect to see many airports put in place the infrastructure to either generate that fuel on-site, or pipe it in, or have some storage to make sure that fuel is able to get into the aircraft in a practical way.
Kelly Ungerman: I think there’s a real question, if hydrogen-powered aircraft become the norm: Do airports have the right infrastructure? Are they making the right investments for the infrastructure that will be required to service very different aircraft from today?
Alex Dichter: Hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered aircraft, pure-hydrogen-powered aircraft—and I think these are probably a little further off in the future than many might think—will require a radical change in airport design. We’ll need much larger and different storage tanks for pure hydrogen. If we’re using hydrogen fuel cells, we’ll need the infrastructure to move them around rapidly. For electric aviation, we’ll need the ability to charge batteries and, importantly, to rapidly swap them out. Understanding where these types of things would go and how they would fit into the broader design of airports is absolutely critical if we’re going to reach sustainability goals.
Accommodating larger passenger flows
Vik Krishnan: I believe that travel in the future should continue to be available to more and more people around the world, including people who historically were not able to participate in travel—either for economic reasons or because opportunities weren’t afforded to them in terms of being able to get from one place to another. That means putting a bit of responsibility on airports, airlines, and all the various players in the travel ecosystem to consider the needs of people who might not be quite as practiced at going through the airport. And they have to do it in a way that makes it very easy for that less-frequent traveler to actually enjoy the travel experience, as opposed to being anxious about it, which is often how they feel today.
Alex Dichter: We’ve all seen that airports are getting more crowded, and in some cases almost impossibly more crowded. I think one of the biggest challenges for airports of the future is to contemplate future growth and build growth plans that are modular, with facilities that can breathe, if you will, with demand.
The bottom line is that this industry grows at nearly 5 percent and, in some cases, more than 5 percent per year. If we don’t contemplate that kind of growth in the design of the physical plan, we will find that the airports we’re building become obsolete much more quickly than we imagined they might.
Alastair Green: I think almost anyone who’s planning or building an airport is struggling with the uncertainty. Airports can often cope with the raw volume of passengers, but there are bottlenecks in two places that are especially painful. They tend to be around the customer service desks of the major airlines, particularly after some sort of travel disruption, and then at the food and beverage locations, especially around peak meal times. Both of those things can be solved with better technology, which is available today.
An airport full of flying cars?
Alastair Green: Today, many airport passengers choose economy off-site parking, sometimes waiting as long as half an hour for a shuttle bus to take them in. The dream for 2050 would be to have widely available eVTOLs [electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft] or urban air mobility. This might seem like a pipe dream today, but if we can get the cost equation right, people will be able to show up at the airport in some form of autonomous helicopter, essentially, instead of parking a car.
Steve Saxon: If eVTOLs develop as we expect, airports will need to change, because they need to manage the airspace for the long-haul traditional flights at the same time as managing a lower-altitude airspace for what are, in effect, helicopter-like vehicles. That requires innovation. We’re still going to have airports, but we’re going to have many more smaller flying vehicles going in and out of them, arriving autonomously, with passengers from the city and from the surrounding area. Maybe they’ll arrive with groups of four to ten passengers, who will then be connected to a long-haul plane. So the air around the airport will be buzzing with autonomous eVTOLs.
Vik Krishnan: In a world where people arrive at an airport in a flying car as opposed to in a train or a conventional vehicle, you can potentially process passengers through at a remote spot, so that when they get to the airport, they just walk onto the airplane. You could see a world where security processes are performed at a downtown location, where people get on a flying vehicle that doesn’t require a runway to take off, and they are transported to the airport’s air side—in other words, behind security.
Kelly Ungerman: In terms of a truly disruptive future, there is a scenario where you barely set foot in an airport at all. An eVTOL picks you up in your backyard or on a landing pad that’s a block away from you, and it transports you to the airport, right next to the widebody jet that’s leaving. You show up ten minutes before departure and never set foot in the airport. That’s a pretty disruptive but potentially realistic future.
