Opinion | Have We Been Designing Airports the Wrong Way Round All Along?

For decades airports have been designed around aircraft, capacity and passenger forecasts. Pittsburgh International Airport suggests the industry may have been asking the wrong questions from the very beginning.

When governments announce a new airport expansion, the headlines almost always focus on the same metrics.

How many passengers will it handle?

How many aircraft movements will it accommodate?

How many gates, security lanes and baggage belts will it need?

Everything begins with growth forecasts, capacity models and engineering drawings.

People come later.

But what if that approach is fundamentally flawed?

That is precisely the challenge being posed by Christina Cassotis, Chief Executive of Pittsburgh International Airport, whose philosophy turns decades of airport planning on its head.

Rather than beginning with terminals, runways or passenger forecasts, she starts with three remarkably simple questions.

What's broken?

What frustrates people?

How do we fix it?

At first glance, it sounds almost too obvious.

Yet perhaps that is exactly why it deserves far more attention.

Infrastructure should solve problems—not create them

Across the world, airports have become astonishing feats of engineering.

Many are architectural masterpieces.

Some resemble luxury shopping centres more than transport hubs.

Yet ask most travellers about their airport experience and the answers are remarkably consistent.

• Long queues.

• Confusing layouts.

• Stress.

• Poor wayfinding.

• Walking miles between gates.

The irony is obvious.

Billions are spent building airports that often leave passengers feeling exhausted before they even board their aircraft.

Cassotis argues that passenger experience is not an optional extra added after operational planning.

It is operational planning.

She explained:

"If you actually do improve the passenger experience, you are optimising. If you don't start with what makes sense for the people who need the facility to work for them – whether they're travelling through it, working in it or partnering with it – I don't think you can optimise efficiently."

It's difficult to disagree.

• Every confusing sign creates delay.

• Every bottleneck creates congestion.

• Every anxious passenger creates operational friction.

• Good design isn't simply attractive.

It's efficient.

Designing for people instead of passenger numbers

Walk through Pittsburgh's new terminal and one feature immediately stands out.

Space.

Natural light floods the building.

Sightlines are open.

Passengers instinctively know where to go.

The terminal doesn't feel oversized.

It feels relaxed.

That wasn't an architectural statement.

It was an operational decision.

Cassotis even referenced something rarely heard in infrastructure planning.

She wanted families meeting arriving passengers to have room for their own "Love Actually reunions" without everyone feeling crushed together.

It sounds sentimental.

In reality, it's exceptional engineering.

Because somebody finally designed a building around human behaviour instead of passenger processing algorithms.

Resilience isn't about technology—it's about people

Perhaps even more striking is Pittsburgh's approach to energy resilience.

The airport's much-discussed microgrid has attracted global attention.

Many see it as an impressive renewable energy project.

Cassotis sees something entirely different.

Insurance.

Following major power failures at airports including Los Angeles and Atlanta, Pittsburgh asked a simple question.

What happens if we lose power?

The answer became one of aviation's most advanced airport microgrids.

Remarkably, when a nearby substation fire occurred shortly before Heathrow's widely reported outage earlier this year, Pittsburgh barely noticed.

As Cassotis explained:

"Two weeks before Heathrow lost power, we had the same issue with a fire at a substation and our microgrid kicked into island mode. The lights flickered, and nothing else happened to disrupt operations."

That single sentence says everything.

The greatest engineering success is often the one passengers never even notice.

Thinking beyond the airport fence

Perhaps Pittsburgh's most refreshing characteristic is its refusal to define narrow organisational boundaries.

Many airports view themselves simply as landlords.

Airlines fly aircraft.

Fuel companies provide fuel.

Energy companies provide electricity.

Cargo operators move freight.

Everyone has their own responsibilities.

Cassotis believes that thinking limits innovation.

Whether discussing sustainable aviation fuel, regional energy generation or passenger services, she repeatedly returns to collaboration.

She said:

"I don't know that there's a hard line between airports and airlines. I think we all need to be working together a lot better."

It's an observation that resonates far beyond aviation.

Transport systems increasingly depend on integration rather than ownership.

The most successful infrastructure projects are rarely those with the biggest budgets.

They are the ones where organisations stop protecting boundaries and start solving problems together.

A lesson Britain should embrace

There is perhaps no better time for the UK to reflect on this philosophy.

Britain is considering the future of Heathrow.

Regional airports are redefining their purpose.

Advanced Air Mobility, autonomous ground transport and sustainable aviation fuels are rapidly moving from concept to reality.

Yet many projects are still planned using assumptions developed decades ago.

Forecast demand.

Build capacity.

Hope passengers adapt.

Maybe we should reverse that process.

Perhaps every infrastructure project—whether an airport, railway station or motorway—should begin with a completely different question.

How do people actually experience this place?

Everything else should follow.

The airports of tomorrow may not look different—they may simply feel different

Pittsburgh International Airport is not claiming to predict the future.

Quite the opposite.

Its new terminal has deliberately been designed to evolve because nobody knows exactly what aviation will look like in twenty years' time.

That flexibility may prove to be its greatest strength.

When asked what she hoped Pittsburgh would be known for in another decade, Cassotis didn't talk about passenger numbers or awards.

She simply hoped to walk through the airport and think:

"Oh my gosh, I never would have thought of that. Isn't that great?"

It's a wonderfully humble ambition.

Perhaps it should become the benchmark for every infrastructure project.

The greatest airports of the future may not be those with the longest runways, the tallest terminals or the most spectacular architecture.

They may simply be the ones that remembered who they were being built for in the first place.

And if that's true, perhaps we've been designing airports backwards all along.