Autonomous vehicles are no longer a distant idea for airports. At our July Airport Community Forum, David Sankey, our CEO, shared what he has learned exploring the topic in his first months in aviation, and what it could mean for training and safety airside.

Coming from education technology, David approached the subject from a fresh angle. His focus was less on what the technology can do, and more on how airports prepare their people, training and safety systems for it.

The Mixed Traffic Challenge

David opened with Changi Airport, which now runs a fully unmanned fleet of autonomous baggage tractors between Terminals 1 and 4. The vehicles completed 5,000 test trips before going live, and use more than ten sensors and cameras to navigate the apron. Munich and Heathrow have also been running trials.

But as David pointed out, the technology is rarely the hard part. The apron is already a crowded, time-pressured space, with tugs, fuel bowsers, stairs, buses and people on foot all working around live aircraft. The real question is how automated and human-operated vehicles share it safely, in what is known as a mixed traffic environment.

Drivers Do More Than Drive

Eye contact, a wave, a glance in one direction: these small signals are a big part of how people move safely around each other airside, and they disappear when there is no one behind the wheel.

David drew on research from Professor Natasha Merat at the University of Leeds, which shows people feel measurably less safe around vehicles with no driver. Without those cues, pedestrians and other drivers often assume they have right of way. Trust cuts both ways, too. Too much of it reduces safety, while too little leads to hesitation, delays and people overriding the system.

Integrate or Segregate?

One option is to keep autonomous vehicles separate from everything else. That works in some industries. Mining has used autonomous vehicles for more than ten years, but still relies on segregation rather than mixing them with human-driven traffic.

Airside, that is much harder. Without a major redesign of the apron, fencing off space for different vehicles simply is not practical, so airports are likely to face the mixed traffic question head on.

Final Perspective

It is tempting to assume automation means fewer skills. David argued the opposite: sharing the apron with autonomous vehicles calls for new ones, from supervising automated fleets to knowing how to respond when a vehicle does not behave as expected. Training will need to cover the people, the vehicles and the environment together.

Data sits underneath all of it. Understanding how people and vehicles actually behave airside, and where the hotspots are, is what will let airports adapt safely. Telematics, which gives a live picture of how vehicles move across an airfield, could play a big part here.

David closed with a question regulators are already asking: when there is no driver, who is accountable after an incident? As he put it, the research raised more questions than answers, and they are ones the industry will need to keep working through together.

Join us at the next Airport Community Forum. Our final forum of the year is in November. Register your place here.