We have been reminded, in short order, that modern airport operations depend as much on wires and code as they do on runways and radios. When passenger processing systems or the infrastructure that feeds them fail, the downstream effect is immediate and operationally brutal. The recent closure of Heathrow after a substation fire on 20 March 2025 exposed how a single infrastructure hit can cascade through flight schedules, staff rosters, turnaround planning, and passenger flows. Operational teams were forced to reconfigure power feeds and run manual workarounds while airlines and handlers negotiated crew and aircraft positioning in real time.

Cyber events are a different vector but produce the same arithmetic: lost automation equals slower processing equals longer delays and, often, cancellations. The Port of Seattle ransomware incident in August 2024 shows how a single intrusion can force handwritten boarding passes, disabled displays, and manual bag tags for hours while teams recover systems and data. Those knock-on effects translated to slower turnbacks and heavier workload on ground crews.

We have also seen politically motivated denial-of-service campaigns that target airport-facing services and temporarily take websites and information portals offline. That kind of nuisance attack does not directly halt air traffic control, but it strips airlines and passengers of situational awareness and degrades the flow of information operators rely on during disruptions. The October 2022 DDoS campaigns against several U.S. airports are an example.

Those events make two operational truths obvious to a pilot or duty manager. First, resilience must be engineered into the operation, not bolted on afterwards. Second, people and procedures remain the ultimate recovery tool. You cannot fly a passenger out of a terminal that cannot check bags, but you can keep aircraft moving if staff are trained and equipped to run manual processes without turning the terminal into chaos.

Concrete steps for fortifying aviation IT and associated operations

1) Rehearse manual fallbacks regularly

  • Schedule quarterly full-scale drills that force staff to process 10 to 20 percent of daily throughput manually for several hours. Test handwritten boarding passes, manual bag tagging, and whiteboard gate assignments. Those drills reveal choke points most tabletop exercises miss.

2) Harden supplier and shared-platform risk

  • Map shared systems used by airlines, handlers and airports. Treat common-use platforms and managed services as critical suppliers. Contracts must include recovery time objectives, secure configuration baselines, mandatory incident notification timelines, and proof of independent audits. Concentration risk is not academic. Where a single vendor sits between multiple airlines and multiple airports, an outage is an industry outage.

3) Segment networks and apply air-gapped fallbacks for essential systems

  • Logical segmentation limits lateral movement during an intrusion. For truly critical elements like flight information displays, local bag-drop controllers, and agent-host terminals, maintain a hardened, air-gapped fallback path that can operate autonomously for a defined period.

4) Prioritise human-machine interfaces that degrade gracefully

  • Design kiosks, bagdrops and gate systems to default to a readable manual mode when back end services fail. That means printed receipts, clear signage and preprinted spare bag tags available at counters. Make sure staff have mobile devices with local, cached manifests for passenger lookup.

5) Coordinate with utilities and national infrastructure owners

  • The Heathrow power outage showed the operational exposure when local utilities are unaware of critical customers and their continuity needs. Airports must formalise redundancy requirements with grid operators and test transfer switchover plans. Emergency power logic must be exercised end to end, not just at generator rooms.

6) Increase practical cyber hygiene across operations

  • Baseline controls matter: multi factor authentication, patching, endpoint detection, and least privilege. But aviation needs tailored measures: stricter controls on USB use in operational systems, privileged account monitoring during peak ops, and dedicated incident response liaisons embedded in duty operations.

7) Improve information sharing and joint rehearsal with national cyber bodies

  • Use national cyber centres and industry groups to share indicators of compromise and practical mitigations. ICAO and regional bodies have pushed stronger aviation cyber posture in recent years; operators should engage with that work and adopt common playbooks.

8) Treat regulatory change as an operational driver, not merely compliance

  • New aviation information security rules and guidance push airport operators and suppliers to adopt formal information security management systems and report incidents. Start implementing the documented processes now so compliance deadlines do not become last-minute crises. Practical guidance and implementation roadmaps are available and should be folded into Safety Management Systems.

Checklist for Ops Directors and Duty Managers

  • Confirm manual check-in and bag-drop kits are stocked and accessible in each terminal for immediate deployment.
  • Run a weekly verification of alternative communications: battery powered radios, preprinted passenger advisories and laminated diversion procedures for gate teams.
  • Maintain a rolling 72-hour staffing surge plan with cross-trained agents who can be reallocated to bottleneck positions.
  • Ensure SLAs with vendors include tabletop participation clauses and that vendors are required to provide hands-on support during incidents.
  • Log a vendor concentration review in the operational risk register and assign mitigations for the top three shared systems.

Closing practical note

Technology gives us speed and throughput, but it also concentrates risk when systems are shared and single points of failure exist. Pilots, ramp crews and operations managers know how brittle a plan looks when a simple tool is removed. The right posture is straightforward: build redundancy, practise the slow way of doing things often, and force suppliers to survive without cloud portals for a weekend. That combination is what keeps aircraft flying and passengers moving when the unexpected happens.

Ryan Kessler

About the author Ryan Kessler is a commercial pilot and aviation safety consultant. He writes from frontline operational experience about how policy and technology must serve the real work of getting aircraft away on time and safely.