“Yes, our summer flights should run smoothly, provided nothing unusual happens,” said Kunsch. “However, if there are heavy rains of a completely new magnitude, such as we had in Hamburg in late June or in Dubai in April, this will definitely affect our operations.” And even a a global IT outage that caused major disruption to air traffic worldwide on Friday (July 19, 2024) has not dampened their optimism. Although Hamburg Airport’s systems were not hit, the flight schedule was disrupted, but stabilised the next day.
Staff shortages remain the biggest challenge and probably after the summer season as well, Schmitz said. “The wave of retiring baby boomers is rolling and we simply cannot replace all those employees.” Thus, the airport is turning to digitalisation and automation. “We are testing, for instance, robots. They take over as soon as the luggage has been loaded onto the trolleys from the aircraft and lift the suitcases and bags onto the carousels themselves,” Schmitz said, adding: “And I’m pinning my hopes on artificial intelligence, e.g., in terms of optimised passenger flow management, taking the new AI law of course into account.”
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