INSIDER: Perth Airport and the future of flying after COVID-19 chaos

It’s a Thursday night in November, 2025, and you are heading off on a trip to Paris. It’s a long but direct flight, which have proliferated since the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 to meet demand from wary passengers trying to minimise the stops they make. You’ll be boarding a smaller plane — big aircraft have not made a comeback after being shelved when international travel screeched to a halt — but the flights are frequent, so you have more options. You check in online at home, including pre-paying for parking. As you drive into Perth Airport, a scanner in the carpark recognises the vehicle’s numberplate and opens the gate; you don’t even have to wind down the window. Inside, a biometric check-in panel scans your face, brings up your details and issues your ticket and bag tags, which you attach to your suitcase before you drop it off yourself. You wave your hands under one of the sanitiser units dotted throughout the terminal and it automatically dispenses the liquid. More Insider At security, another scan of your face and you continue to border control, standing on the markings ensuring a safe distance from the person in front. The system again recognises you, without anyone touching your passport, and allows you to proceed. If you stop to buy something duty free or have a bite to eat, all transactions are cashless. When you board, another face scan allows you through without handing over your boarding pass. As you moved through the airport, from the carpark to the plane, you have touched almost nothing. While the scenario is hypothetical — the facial recognition biometrics are to be tested at 36 new check-in kiosks at Perth Airport when international travel resumes and some of the touchless technology is still being developed — this could be the future of flying, says Perth Airport chief executive Kevin Brown. When COVID-19 swept across the globe, the aviation industry was one of the hardest hit. Airlines were almost entirely grounded, many opting to send long-haul planes to desert ‘boneyards’, where the dry air could preserve them for the foreseeable future. But some will never make it back; Brown says aviation will be one of the last sectors to recover and airlines will likely be cautious to begin with, using smaller craft, such as the Boeing 787 or Airbus 350, adding more flights if and when demand increases. Recent news on growing potential for an effective vaccine is welcome news for the travel sector but its recovery will rely on a key issue: how confident is the travelling public that the process of flying, as well as their particular destination, is safe? As airports worldwide grapple with the question of how to make passengers comfortable enough to make the leap, at Perth Airport much of the work has already been done; in fact, it happened almost overnight, during the frenetic early days of the pandemic. Where many airports opted to close to stem the financial bleeding, that was not an option in Perth, where hundreds of thousands of workers need to be ferried north to resources projects in the State’s economic engine room, the Pilbara. So despite plummeting revenue, which the airport largely earns per passenger, and the overheads associated with keeping everything running, Brown and his crisis team ploughed on, meeting twice a day for months as the ground constantly shifted under their feet. Field hospitals sprang up in tents on either side of the terminal, where workers answer questions and are checked for fever; as technology has advanced, they also have a blood test before being allowed to board. Common ‘touch points’, such as door handles and security trays, are treated with long-lasting anti-microbial spray. Cleaning is done deeply and often, to hospital-grade standards, and even the air-conditioning has been altered to get more fresh air into the terminals. Last month, Perth Airport became the first in Australia and one of only a handful globally to gain COVID-safe accreditation from the Airport Council International. Rather than relying on theory, Brown says they were able to point to measures already taken, which had allowed them to handle 1.5 million mostly FIFO passengers through the height of the pandemic, without incident. Remaining open also allowed repatriation flights for returning Australians and crucial belly-hold cargo movements, importing vital medical supplies and exporting WA’s in-demand fresh produce, including tens of thousands of tonnes of seafood and rock lobsters to China and pork to Singapore. The accreditation is an achievement Brown hopes will help give potential travellers the confidence to fly — and tourists, international students and business passengers another reason to choose Perth and WA as their destination. WA’s hard border to the rest of the country softened on November 14 and there is speculation about which overseas destinations will be first to open up, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirming discussions with countries successful in suppressing COVID-19, including Japan, South Korea and Singapore. But Brown predicts it will be two to three years before interstate flights get back to normal, and up to four years for international travel. The irony is not lost on him that less than a year ago, WA had never been more connected to the world; Singapore Airlines had added a fifth daily flight, Japan had upgraded aircraft on its new daily route, Emirates and Cathay Pacific had increased capacity and a trial of direct flights with Manila had just been announced with Philippine Airlines. A five-week trial with Shanghai, years in the making, was under way when Australian borders effectively closed to China in February. But, as Brown says, “there is no point crying in the corner”. “As we go back, we have to do everything we can to not just get back what we had but to look at what new markets we can get into ... such as Vietnam, Korea and Taiwan,” he says. “The aviation sector and the airport is really important to that economic worth of the State. Where we are geographically, it is a long walk and a long swim to go anywhere but we are not really remote in terms of the connectivity we had. “So however those borders open up, the bubbles to those jurisdictions ... our mindset is very much that we are not just looking to recreate what we had; we need to reinvent what we do, reinvent that journey through the airport, speaking to passengers to understand where their anxieties are coming from and what we need to do to help.” Dedicating aircraft to a route was a big investment before COVID-19 and cash-strapped airlines are likely to be even more demanding of a compelling business case for a destination post-pandemic. But Brown’s view is that COVID-19 should also be viewed as a “circuit breaker”; a leveller that gives WA the chance to improve its position, including gaining a foothold with the burgeoning middle class of India — if we have the foresight to take it. “For me, it is all about opportunity. There would be nothing worse if after all the pain and suffering people have been through, if we don’t come out somewhere better at the end of this,” he says. “While the gates are shut, we all need to line up and get into pole position so we are not starting at the back of the pack.” Key to grasping those opportunities will be a “Team WA” approach, where “we hunt as a pack ... universities working together, producers working together, tourism operators working together”. “We can tell a bigger story and put our finite resources together to make sure we are marketing our product and selling ourselves ... I had seen signs of it pre-COVID when we were building the relationship with Japan, which led to daily flights ... But my view is we need to double our efforts on that front and not be complacent, because we are not going to be competing just with the rest of Australia but the rest of the world. “A lot of sharp minds are going to be thinking, ‘How do we invest? How do we reinvent what we do?’ The pace we had before will not be sufficient because everyone will be looking to up their game.” Balancing supply of airline seats with demand will be crucial. Too few seats early on and ticket prices go up, discouraging travellers who might have been considering a trip. As Brown explains, the impact of each traveller lost to WA is not just that of an individual consumer, but of the knock-on effect that can snowball from them. “The work we have done with the Committee for Perth makes it clear that people who come here, whether for business or leisure, and are impressed, become our greatest advocates. The more people we bring in, the more we get our share of business tourism, leisure tourism, international students, then you may have businesses setting up headquarters here, then you get airlines setting up direct flights. “The more than happens, the more planes that fly and the more belly-hold cargo that becomes available to take our produce to the market. The more people that eat and value our food, the more likely they are to visit and the greater the return to producers, who can then reinvest. It is more diversification of our economy. “There is a danger if we slow down and lose our momentum and position, someone else will take up the megaphone and shout about their destinations and their produce.” The affable Scot, who has been in leadership roles at airports in the UK and Australia for 15 years, remains upbeat. But it is hard to overstate the impact of the pandemic on Perth Airport and his team. He has dealt with erupting volcanoes and terrorism threats but nothing so unrelenting. Brown expects he will remember forever that phone call he received early on a Saturday afternoon in February, telling him Australia had just closed its borders to China. His mind flashed briefly to the movie, The Terminal, where Tom Hanks’ character is forced to live in an airport for 18 years after becoming stateless, and sure enough, upon checking he discovered two flights from China were already in the air, due to arrive in Perth at 10pm. The airport’s crisis team assembled to assess their options. In the end, the passengers were allowed to enter Australia but it was the first taste of the rapidly shifting environment that would characterise the rest of the year. Since then, a drop of six million passengers has smashed the airport’s finances, leading to a 45 per cent drop in net profit last financial year. It has been forced to cut its workforce by 27 per cent, with remaining staff using up leave and working reduced hours, as well as executives taking pay cuts. The projection for this financial year is even more dire; four million passengers, compared to the 15 million they had been expecting in 2019-2020 before the pandemic hit. Brown recently told a parliamentary committee he is borrowing “millions of dollars a week” to stay open. But even with immediate problems of such magnitude, Brown knows he must also keep an eye on the horizon. The airport’s leadership decided to press on with capital projects, including upgrades to the boarding gates and the self-check-in gates in the international terminal. “We were committed to those projects pre-COVID and contractually, if we had stopped them it probably would have cost us as much,” he says. “But they are the right projects to take us through to the other side so when those borders fully open, when it is safe, we have developed and evolved our processes.” And while it may seem a strange argument for an airport handling only a fraction of the passengers, capacity remains an issue — even with almost no other flights, there was congestion on the tarmac during peak times for the FIFO planes. “We still have to think about the long term; we do our master planning 20 years out,” Brown says. “The second parallel runway and centralising the terminals, which is more cost effective, are still important projects for us.”

INSIDER: Perth Airport and the future of flying after COVID-19 chaos

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