By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Transformation Nobody’s Fully Grasping Yet
Walk through any major airport today and you’re witnessing an institution in the early stages of existential transformation. The massive parking structures generating 40-50% of non-aeronautical revenue? They’ll be largely empty by 2035. The carefully designed terminal flows optimized for passengers arriving by personal vehicle? Obsolete. The clear separation between ground transportation and air operations? Dissolved.
Future airports won’t just look different—they’ll operate on fundamentally different economic models, serve radically different transportation modes, and integrate technologies that blur the distinction between ground and air travel in ways that make today’s airports seem as quaint as train stations from the 1950s.
I’ve written about future airports several times over the past few years, covering everything from air taxis to pilotless travel to robot food delivery. But I’ve never quite grasped the full scope of the transition we’re living through right now—the uncomfortable period where old revenue models collapse before new ones fully materialize, where infrastructure designed for one transportation paradigm must adapt to serve another, and where the very definition of “airport” expands to include facilities that look nothing like what we recognize today.
Let me walk you through what airports actually become by 2035, why the transition is more disruptive than anyone’s admitting, and what replaces the business models that have sustained airports for decades.
Continue reading… “The Coming Airport Revolution: When AI, Drone Ports, Air Taxis, and Autonomous Vehicles Converge”