Tarmac Comeback: Why Airport Efficiency Depends on Solving Ground Handling’s Unsexy Issues
Hear a super quick podcast-style overview of the issues and implications facing ground handling operations!
Let’s be honest with ourselves–ground handling isn’t that glamorous.
It doesn’t make the headlines. You don’t find it splashed across billboards. And yet, without it, not a single plane leaves the gate.
Ground handling is the logistical glue of aviation. We’re talking baggage loading, aircraft towing, fueling, catering, passenger services. The works. It keeps the global aviation engine running.
But in 2025, that engine is starting to stall.
Air traffic has surged past pre-pandemic levels, reaching 9.5 billion passengers in 2024. Leisure travel is to thank for that boost, but business travel is quickly catching up–give it another year or two, and it’ll easily be above pre-Covid levels. And yet, ground operations haven’t caught up. The result is delays, missed connections, mounting costs, and a system in massive need of some upgrades.
At Beam, we see this as both a problem and a massive opportunity. Because when systems are stressed, there’s space to build something better.
The Current Landscape: Ground Handling in 2025
Aviation is officially back.
It took a few years, but passenger volumes are booming. Cargo capacity is maxed. And after years of turbulence, airports are again operating at full tilt.
But there’s a problem hiding in plain sight: ground handling teams are buckling under pressure.
According to Satair, staffing levels remain far below what’s needed to keep up with traffic. Critical functions like ramp services, baggage handling, and passenger support are under-resourced and overstretched.
“Persistent labour shortages affect pilots, maintenance crews, ground staff and air traffic controllers.” – Satair
And it’s not just anecdotal. A 2023 survey by IATA found that 37 percent of ground handling professionals expected staff shortages to continue well into the future.
Meanwhile, modernization is crawling. A few forward-looking airports, like Oslo, are experimenting with autonomous baggage systems. As BEUMER Group noted, “BHS operators… are now taking an interest: the mission to automate the ground handling system has begun.“
But far too many airports are still stuck in manual mode. Processes haven’t meaningfully changed in decades. Ground Support Equipment (GSE) is frequently misplaced, malfunctioning, or poorly coordinated.
And the digital infrastructure is…fragmented, at best. Airlines, airports, and contractors often run entirely separate systems that don’t speak to each other. That means no real-time updates, no shared situational awareness, and lots of costly-but-preventable delays.
As the Airports Council puts it: “Airports will need to balance operational stability with the need to be nimble and flexible.” Right now, they’re getting neither.
The Roots of the Ground Handling Problem
This isn’t just about short-staffed teams or aging tech. The crisis in ground handling is structural, driven by four individual, interlocking forces.
1. The COVID Effect
When COVID grounded global aviation, tens of thousands of jobs disappeared overnight. Ground staff were laid off en masse or nudged into early retirement—and many never came back.
As Airside International reported: “Aviation was one of the worst-hit industries during Covid – and ground handlers in particular are continuing to struggle post-pandemic with recruitment and retention.“
Some workers found better jobs elsewhere. Others simply left for good. 2. A Hiring Pipeline That’s Broken
Let’s face it: these jobs are hard and thankless. Long hours, low pay, brutal weather, and limited career progression. It’s no surprise the sector struggles to attract new workers—and even harder to keep them. Making matters worse is the fact that Gen Z hasn’t embraced traditional, manual occupations with the same verve as their predecessors, meaning that recruitment of the younger generations can be a huge struggle for airports.
According to ScienceDirect, outdated scheduling tools and a lack of investment in wellbeing are only exacerbating the issues (no surprise there).
And while the aviation industry has done well to reduce some operational pain points—“the global mishandled bag rate (MBR) has dropped 63% since 2007” (International Airport Review)—it hasn’t solved the root workforce issues that make those gains hard to sustain at scale.
3. Operational Inefficiency by Design
Even when teams are staffed, the systems around them don’t work. Equipment is often in the wrong place, or not working at all. Crew members waste time chasing down tugs instead of turning aircraft. Meanwhile, passengers can sit on the tarmac for hours waiting to disembark.
“The primary finding of this study indicates that GSE can significantly contribute to flight delays.” – SpringerLink
And when optimized correctly? The impact is immediate. “The most important finding… was that the overall time of aircraft ground handling was reduced by approximately 25 minutes.” – MDPI
That’s the difference between an on-time departure and a network-wide domino delay.
4. A Race to the Bottom
Most ground handling contracts go to the lowest bidder. This encourages short-term thinking, lean staffing, and no investment in redundancy, innovation, or long-term resilience.
As International Airport Review notes, “A limited market size combined with regulatory constraints and lack of standardisation makes suppliers hesitant to commit to developing new baggage innovations.” It’s not just a funding issue—it’s an ecosystem problem.
Why It Matters: The Real-World Cost of Inaction
These aren’t just behind-the-scenes annoyances. Ground handling failures have system-wide consequences.
Delays Become Standard
Baggage delays, fueling issues, and crew coordination failures all contribute to longer turnarounds. That forces airlines to build buffer time into their schedules, hurting efficiency and fleet utilization.
Studies show a clear correlation: volatility in ground ops means lower reliability across airline networks.
Passenger Satisfaction Plummets
Few things frustrate passengers more than long waits, missing luggage, and chaotic boarding. These seemingly small failures compound into lost loyalty, reputational damage, and increased compensation costs for both airports and airlines.
Capacity Gets Capped
Even when infrastructure is available (think: runways, gates, apron space) ground ops can’t keep up. Throughput is throttled by underpowered teams and slow equipment. This acts as a soft cap on airport capacity, especially at major hubs.
Safety Gets Compromised
Aviation depends on precision and timing. When teams are exhausted, understaffed, and rushed, the chance of mistakes goes up. And in a high-risk environment, even small errors can escalate quickly.
Where We Go from Here: Rethinking Ground Handling
Something’s got to change. By 2053, we’re expecting the worldwide number of passengers to be more than double current numbers–by some estimates, as many as 22 billion flying the friendly skies. If the system is stressed already, without change, it’s heading for a full-blown breakdown. Here’s the good news: this problem is fixable.
But it requires coordinated action across three key areas:
Workforce Reform
Fixing staffing challenges in ground handling is about using the people you already have more intelligently as much as it is about hiring more people. Today, too many airport teams rely on static schedules and outdated rostering systems that simply don’t reflect the real-time complexity of airport operations. That leads to uneven workloads, missed handoffs, and overworked crews trying to plug gaps that could have been predicted (and prevented).
Tools like dynamic rostering and real-time scheduling platforms are already making an impact. By continuously aligning workforce availability with live operational data, they help deploy staff more effectively during peak hours, reassign tasks when delays occur, and keep teams better informed about what’s happening across the ramp. These tools reduce idle time and overbooking while relieving the pressure that comes from working in a system that’s constantly out of sync.
And those are just two examples. As airports and service providers modernize their operations, there’s growing potential for additional workforce tools that reduce decision fatigue, flag inefficiencies before they escalate, and ensure every role is used where it delivers the most value.
Targeted Automation
When people hear “automation,” they often think of replacing jobs. But in ground handling, it’s not about reducing headcount. It’s about making hard jobs more manageable. Many of the tasks that bog down ground crews–hauling baggage, repositioning equipment, manually tracking turnaround progress–are repetitive, physically demanding, and prone to error. Automating these workflows doesn’t remove the need for skilled people; it gives them space to focus on higher-value, safety-critical tasks. Predictive maintenance systems, for example, can ensure that Ground Support Equipment is always operational and in the right place at the right time, reducing equipment downtime and turnaround delays.
“As labour shortages continue to cause headaches for airport operators, the industry continues to ramp up its efforts to implement automated solutions.” – BEUMER Group
Autonomous tugs and baggage vehicles, now being piloted in several European airports, are another key example. These systems can operate with precision on the apron, helping streamline aircraft loading and unloading without overburdening staff. As BEUMER Group puts it, “the mission to automate the ground handling system has begun”—and with good reason. And beyond the vehicles themselves, smarter automation also includes integrated task management, routing software, and apron coordination tools that improve safety, reduce congestion, and allow operations teams to respond faster to real-time disruptions.
And as Airside International puts it: “The other big selling points of autonomous GSE are safety, efficiency and moving the needle forward.“
The Beam Perspective: Build for Resilience, Not Just Recovery
At Beam, we build startups that solve unsexy but essential logistics problems—the kinds of problems people ignore until the system starts to strain.
Ground handling is exactly that kind of problem. Quietly overlooked for years. Now, it’s the weak link in a high-stakes global system.
The industry will modernize. The only question is: who’s going to lead it?
We believe it starts with reframing ground handling as a strategic asset, not a cost to be minimized. And with the right mix of workforce support, automation, and smart governance, this pain point becomes a competitive advantage.
If you’re an entrepreneur with ideas to tackle these kinds of overlooked operational challenges, we want to hear from you.
Let’s build the future of aviation from the ground (handling) up.
