This project will explore new airport concepts with radical and novel solutions to prepare airports for 2050 and beyond. It will build on the High Level Target Concepts (HLTC) from the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) 2. The SRA-2 underlines the importance of the air transport sector with respect to value added, Gross Domestic Product, jobs and people mobility. The airport plays a vital role in the Air Transport System (ATS).

The future airport will have to meet different objectives amongst other in the area of environment, costs and performance. Each airport is likely to have a focus on one of these areas that can vary between different airports.
Therefore, the “2050+ Airport” project develops three different airport concepts (passenger time efficient, climate neutral and low cost) that demonstrate what the future airport will look like when taking one of the areas as the leading objective. The project shows the benefits and challenges of the different concepts and the trade-offs between the different areas to be made. The airport concepts describe the interface between the aircraft and the ground and the new principles for the airport layout including intermodal connections. The passenger and the baggage will experience a seamless travel through the 2050+ airport.

The approach is to develop concrete concepts taking into account input from existing studies like the “out of the box” project and input from other stakeholders like universities, research institutes, airports and industry. The project provides a scientific methodology to develop and evaluate innovative airport concepts. The output of the project shows which step change innovation is proposed to prepare the different types of airports for the second half of this century.