DAY 1
Roundtables
Take part in our hosted roundtables to gain insights, exchange solutions and strengthen networks. Places are by invitation but you can apply for a place on a particular session using the email links in the descriptions below
DAY 1
Tuesday 29th September
Balfour Beatty
13:15 - 14:30 (Platinum Room 5)
Meeting Aviation's Capacity Challenge: Developing Skills, Strengthening Supply Chains and Creating Local Opportunity
As aviation demand grows, delivering future capacity will require more than infrastructure investment. This discussion will explore how industry can develop skilled workforces, strengthen resilient supply chains, support SMEs, and create lasting social value, ensuring airports can expand while delivering economic opportunity and benefits for local communities.
Jacobs
13:15 - 14:30 (Platinum Room 6)
Technology as an Enabler of Airport Excellence
Technology is increasingly central to shaping operations, aimed at improving efficiency, experience, and asset performance. This interactive roundtable will bring together airport and technology leaders to explore challenges and opportunities through 2035, focusing on the strategies needed to achieve greater efficiency, resilience, and safety through effective implementation, performance measurement, and data-driven decision-making.
Pascall + Watson
13:15 - 14:30 (Platinum Room 7)
Lounge to Boarding: The Next Generation of Piers and Satellites
What’s required to successfully design and deliver tomorrow's airport piers and satellites? The roundtable will bring together a range of experts from the built environment and airport operators for a candid cross-industry conversation on the decisions shaping the future of airside infrastructure. The roundtable will question how passengers are best moved from terminal to aircraft, weigh the trade-offs between Day 1 capacity, flexibility and commercial ambition, and confront the practical realities of building satellites within live operational airfields, from airside logistics and safety to programme and phasing. An honest, wide-ranging discussion on designing and delivering the next generation of resilient, adaptable and passenger-focused airport infrastructure
Arcadis
15:30 - 16:45 (Platinum Room 5)
From Ambition to Action: Creating an Industry Playbook for Sustainable Airport Infrastructure.
Airports are setting clear ambitions across net zero, circularity, resilience, nature and social value, but approaches to translating these commitments into capital project delivery remain fragmented. This interactive roundtable will explore the opportunity to develop a practical, proportionate and industry-led Sustainability by Design Playbook for airport infrastructure. Bringing together airport operators, designers, delivery partners and adjacent sectors. The discussion will test how a shared framework could translate sustainability commitments into consistent project briefs, design decisions, procurement requirements, gateway evidence and KPIs - while retaining flexibility for different airports, asset types and levels of organisational maturity. The ambition is to raise the bar across aviation, enabling leading airports to share good practice while giving smaller and less-resourced airports a clear, scalable route to stronger sustainability outcomes. Participants will be invited to help shape the proposition and consider how the industry could collaborate to develop, test and champion it beyond the event.
AECOM
15:30 - 16:45 (Platinum Room 6)
Expanding Airports in Constrained, Operational and Complex Environments
Airports are increasingly faced with the twin challenges of rising passenger demand and ageing infrastructure, requiring expansion, upgrade and in most cases both, often within significantly space constrained environments. As a result, many airports must find a way to optimise their existing assets and facilities and expand within active and complex operational environments. Through a collaboration between AECOMs market leading subject matter experts and a selection of the UKs leading airport operators our roundtable seeks to understand this challenge and identify solutions combining real life success stories with innovative engineering solutions from around the world.