Outcomes
Curzon established a single, consistent definition of resilience across the airport management organisation — replacing fragmented, department-level interpretations with a shared framework everyone could work from. Eight clear principles for assessing resilience across any airport system were defined and embedded. A practical assessment tool was developed, enabling the airport to evaluate its strategic growth options against rational, objective resilience criteria — ensuring that expansion decisions were grounded in operational reality, not just capacity projections.
Background
The airport’s existing infrastructure left little margin for error. Operating at near-full capacity, stress events — weather-induced poor visibility being among the most common — could rapidly tip the operation into chaotic, multi-system breakdown. The consequences were costly and far-reaching, and while airlines shared responsibility for delays, it was the airport that bore the reputational exposure.
The existing command-and-control model of operations management was insufficiently proactive to handle shock and stress events effectively. But beyond the operational challenge lay a strategic one: with a major expansion programme under consultation, the airport needed a rigorous, objective way to assess the resilience implications of different growth scenarios — and no such framework existed.
Across the organisation, different departments held different and often incompatible understandings of what resilience actually meant, making it impossible to have a coherent, organisation-wide conversation about how to build or measure it.
Curzon Approach
Curzon structured the engagement in two phases, recognising that meaningful progress on resilience measurement was only possible once a shared understanding of the concept itself had been established.
Phase one focused on reaching that common understanding — mapping the range of approaches to resilience that existed across the airport’s various departments, and working with stakeholders to develop a single, consistent definition that could serve as the foundation for everything that followed. This was not a semantic exercise: without alignment on what resilience meant, any attempt to measure or improve it would be undermined by competing assumptions.
Phase two translated that definition into practical tools and criteria. Curzon defined eight resilience principles applicable across any of the airport’s operational systems, providing a structured lens through which both current operations and future growth options could be assessed. A purpose-built assessment tool was then developed to enable the airport’s strategic planning teams to evaluate expansion scenarios against these principles — bringing objectivity and rigour to decisions that would otherwise have been made without a consistent framework for resilience.
