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Every operator remembers. In December 2017, a fire in an underground electrical facility took down Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International — one of the world’s busiest airports — for nearly eleven hours. The fire didn’t just sever primary power; it damaged the cabling feeding the backup system, so the redundancy that was supposed to save the day went dark with everything else. More than 1,180 flights were canceled, tens of thousands of passengers were stranded, and the cost ran into the hundreds of millions across the airport, the airlines, and travelers.

It is tempting to file that under “freak event.” But in March 2026, Denver International lost power during a routine transformer energization, triggered an FAA ground stop, and delayed nearly 500 flights — even though the airport is fed from two substations and one of them kept running. Months earlier, a separate Denver outage was traced to a snake that contacted an energized fuse.

This is happening against a backdrop of strain. Airports Council International North America’s 2025 study puts U.S. commercial airport infrastructure needs at $173.9 billion over five years — up roughly 15% in just two years. The American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card projects a $114 billion funding gap over the coming decade, with passenger traffic forecast to climb more than 50% by 2040, even as the Passenger Facility Charge cap has sat untouched since 2000. The demand is rising, the assets are aging, and the money to modernize is constrained. Resilience is no longer a line item to defend in value engineering. It is the thing that keeps the airport open.

For airport leaders, the question is not whether disruption will occur. It is which systems must keep operating, where the hidden failure points are, and how to sequence investments so resilience becomes a planned program rather than an emergency response.

The vulnerability is upstream (and usually invisible)

If you operate or design airports, you already know this pressure intimately: most facilities are carrying a single point of failure, and it’s rarely anyone’s oversight. It’s the result of decisions made years ago, under real budgets, by people doing their best with the money and information they had.

Facilities built a decade or more ago typically brought their utilities in the most reasonable way available at the time: one power feed, one fiber path, one water main. It works flawlessly right up until it doesn’t. If all your power enters at one point and lands in a switchboard that’s decades old and that board fails, you can’t simply reroute around it, and even your generators may not be able to back-feed through the damage. That isn’t a failure of diligence; it’s the quiet cost of an industry that has had to defer modernization while demand kept climbing. The vulnerability isn’t at the gate, where passengers and operators are looking. It’s upstream — at the feeder, the corridor, the aging board in a room nobody has reason to visit until the day it matters most.

The second challenge is conceptual, and even experienced teams wrestle with it. “Resilience” gets used as if it means one thing, when it actually asks you to make a choice. There is a meaningful difference between an airport that wants passengers to never notice a disruption and one that wants to keep flying planes through it. Keeping people and aircraft moving means protecting a focused set of critical systems: power, telecommunications, the airfield lighting, the control tower, the jet bridges needed to get people on and off a plane and security checkpoints

Making sure a passenger never feels the outage is a far larger ask. Now you’re keeping HVAC, concessions, and restrooms alive too, which pulls water into the equation, because water drives cooling, food service, and sanitation. Both are legitimate goals, and the right answer depends on your facility, your budget, and the community you serve. They simply aren’t the same project, and when they get conflated, it’s the team on the ground that ends up absorbing the gap between expectation and budget.

None of this is about hindsight. It’s about naming the single point of failure, honestly, and naming the continuity you’re buying. Do those two things, and everything downstream (design, sequencing, the hard cost conversations) get clearer and a good deal more manageable to deliver.

Building resilience is a sequence, not a single fix

Moving from exposure to resilience is less about exotic technology and more about disciplined design choices, sequenced over time.

The first is eliminating single points of failure at every utility, including telecommunications. That means redundant, geographically diverse entries for power, multiple looped feeds for water, and — critically — diverse routing for telecommunications. The caution here is the kind insiders nod at: there is always construction around airports, so if both of your main communication lines share a single trench, one excavator can sever them simultaneously. Diversity only counts if it’s diverse in geography, not just in name.

The second is scoping emergency power to the continuity decision the airport has made. Generators and UPS systems exist to ride through the blips and carry the critical loads, but what lands on emergency power — life safety only, or life safety plus telecom, TSA, and the movable portion of jet bridges — should be a deliberate reflection of whether the goal is “egress”, “keep flying” or “business as usual.”

The third, and the most overlooked, is knowing the age and condition of what you own. A surprising number of airports — especially smaller ones — have no capital renewal plan. The posture is “when it breaks, we fix it.” That works until an unmonitored asset fails catastrophically and takes operations with it. A capital renewal plan turns invisible, off-the-books equipment into a tracked, fundable, scheduled program — and lets resilience be planned rather than mourned.

The complexity worth respecting is that renovation and expansion are not the same problem. Renovating a facility designed before anyone thought about redundancy is genuinely hard: you’re rethinking existing infrastructure and often being asked to make it “100% redundant now” within walls that were never sized for it. An expansion is more forgiving — you can upsize incoming utilities, build resilience into the new footprint, and back-feed the existing terminals from the larger service. Same word, very different degrees of difficulty.

The real hurdles (and how teams clear them)

The honest obstacles aren’t technical mysteries. They’re physical, operational, financial, and human.

Space is the quiet adversary. Redundancy, future growth, and maintainability all require room — room to pull and replace coils on an air handler, room to add a parallel system, room to grow. Yet in value engineering, the owner needs square footage to lease to airlines and concessions, and that pressure lands on mechanical, electrical, and storage rooms. On a single project, a design team can be asked dozens of times to carve space out of an electrical room. The answer can’t simply be “yes” or “no” — it’s making the tradeoff visible. The way through is treating space as a resilience asset and planning it at the master-plan level, not negotiating it away room by room.

Master planning prevents the corner you can’t get out of. When two terminals are connected across open ground, and every utility runs through the middle of that ground, the next expansion discovers — too late — that the obvious place to grow is the one place you can’t touch without relocating the entire utility spine at enormous cost. Mapping how the airport will grow and where the resilient corridors must live is what keeps an airport from getting stuck.

Work happens on a live patient. These are operational facilities modified while planes keep moving. That demands heavy phasing, isolation valves, and sectionalized systems so portions can be taken down without dropping the whole airport, and a great deal of time spent on site understanding the existing conditions before touching them.

Connectivity is the dependency everyone feels after it fails. Power gets the headlines, but communications connectivity touches every part of airport operations: building automation, HVAC controls, security, access control, baggage systems, airline operations, and the tools teams use to recover when something goes wrong. If a fiber path is cut or a network node fails, the impact can move quickly from “the internet is down” to “the building is getting hot” or “checkpoints are paused.” Telecommunications diversity deserves the same seriousness as power redundancy: a second feed only helps if it enters from a different path, reaches a different node, and does not share the same trench as the first.

Institutional knowledge is walking out the door. An aging maintenance workforce means the people who knew exactly where to go and what to reset after a power blip are retiring, and that knowledge often isn’t documented. Resilient design increasingly has to be self-documenting with fewer “you just have to know” recovery steps.

The demand curve is bending upward. Electrification of rental fleets and ground service equipment, gas restrictions on new construction in major markets, and broader grid constraints all point in the same direction. That’s why on-site generation, battery storage, microgrids, combined heat and power, and — on a longer horizon — small modular reactors are entering serious conversations. Investing in resilience behaves like insurance, easy to defer until the event that makes you grateful you took action. The strategy that works is layering: right-size the load, build true redundancy and diverse routing, then add on-site generation and storage where the continuity goal and the economics justify it.

How Salas O’Brien can help with airport resilience

If you’re carrying a single point of failure you can’t fully see, the first move is making it visible. Our teams start by assessing what you actually have: where your utilities enter, how old your critical equipment is, and where your real exposure lives. From there, we help you build a capital renewal plan that makes invisible assets visible and fundable, and a master plan that protects the space and corridors your future growth will depend on.

Because most airport work happens in live, operating facilities, we design around phasing, redundancy, and maintainability from day one — so you can take part of a system down without taking the airport down, and so the next renovation isn’t boxed in by this one. Our MEP, electrical, structural, civil, low-voltage, and commissioning teams work as one, and our energy and resiliency specialists bring the on-site generation, microgrid, combined heat and power, and storage expertise that the electrification curve increasingly demands.

Just as important, we show up. Airport relationships are built over years, and having experienced people who can be on your site in hours — not days — matters when continuity is on the line. From small renovations to entirely new terminals, across the full range of hub sizes, our goal is the same as yours: an airport that recovers fast, keeps flying, and is ready for the disruption no one scheduled.

Reach out to [email protected] to connect with our aviation team to talk through your continuity goals.

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