When James Richardson joined London Stansted Airport as Finance Director in December 2019, it was the prospect of a massive expansion plan that really clinched the deal, he says. The airport was recording record daily passenger numbers of around 100,000. Distant rumblings of a virus in Asia were barely registering on the list of business risk factors.

Fast forward three months and the UK was in lockdown, the airport was a skeleton hub recording a low of 300 daily visitors and plans for expansion were on ice as the unknown quantity of the Coronavirus pandemic unfurled.

As lessons in managing uncertainty go, it was a baptism of fire for ACA-qualified Richardson. “Our biggest challenge was that we didn’t know how long the pandemic or travel restrictions would last.” Add to that, the constant changes to rules and government policies and the concept of planning became as ambiguous as the prospect of a large house party.

“It became an almost impossible task to predict even the next day’s passenger numbers, never mind the next week’s, for a business that can usually pretty much project its passenger numbers season-by-season,” he says.

Although air cargo soared on the tailwinds of increased demand and high freight rates, commercial air travel was decimated. High fixed costs meant airlines and airports were the worst affected in the aviation sector, which hemorrhaged losses of $168bn in 2020, according to McKinsey. 

For Richardson, who took over the financial running of London Stansted, Manchester and East Midlands airports (under the banner of Manchester Airports Group, or MAG) during the pandemic, it was to prove a case study in agility. “Just to keep the airports open and secure costs millions of pounds a month. It was about trying to scale the airports down quickly enough to conserve cash, then sell non-core assets and generate enough cash to keep going when we had no certainty over how long the pandemic would go on for or what the impact would be.”

Despite a collective sigh of relief at restrictions lifting, rescaling to meet renewed – albeit uncertain – customer demand was not without its challenges. “If a plane doesn’t fly for a period of days, it requires a week’s worth of work to bring it back into commission. And if you take it out for weeks – as a lot of the long-haul carriers did with their A380s – it takes months getting those aircraft back in the air because they have to be reaccredited.” 

Meanwhile, waning public demand for travel combined with limited aircraft simulator capacity meant some airlines had little choice but to fly planes no matter how empty just to keep networks running and their pilots current, prompting sensationalist headlines about ‘ghost flights’. 

On the ground, the airport faced similar issues to secure suitably-trained and accredited personnel, and process airside passes for the airport’s employees and staff of the 200+ companies that operate on the Stansted site. “There were no shortcuts because if you lose public safety, you’ve got no business,” Richardson warns.

The sector was among the first impacted and last to recover when travel restrictions were eventually lifted. But it has bounced back with pent-up demand fuelling a new dawn in airport usage. London Stansted has enjoyed the fastest recovery to pre-COVID passenger levels of any other major UK airport: passenger numbers for the 12-months to the end of April of 28.6m are up 10.8% on the previous year. 

That pick up means that Stansted is finally able to implement the £1bn expansion plan that lured Richardson over in the first place. “We’re the only airport in London airspace with planning permission to grow our passenger numbers. We’ve now got to build the infrastructure that delivers on that permission as our terminal is nearing capacity. Our aim is to get from our current 28 million to 43 million passengers over the next 10 years – if not sooner.”

More than simply a numbers game, the experience of travel is evolving; having been deprived of the opportunity to travel, passengers are prepared to spend more for experience and convenience. The black swan event also highlighted the potential of technology to improve efficiency and enhance the customer experience, Richardson says.

“Airports of the future are all about automation and making the passenger experience better and tailored to different customer needs, while catering for an increasing variety of passengers as we serve ever more route networks, both European and long-haul, further afield. London Stansted already serves more European destinations than any other UK airport. 

Richardson is no stranger to the airport experience, having racked up some serious air miles over the course of his career. “In a previous role, I was based in Gibraltar with a role looking after multiple countries and used Stansted regularly.”

He cut his teeth in the aviation sector working in corporate finance with PwC. He was advising on what at the time was the firm’s biggest take-private deal – aviation services business Britax – in 2001, when the planes hit the Twin Towers. The impact of 9/11 on the aviation sector was cataclysmic and changed the sector forever, Richardson says, “but the effect on the sector wasn’t as sustained as we saw as a result of COVID”. 

Richardson harboured childhood dreams of being a pilot. Although his career took a different trajectory, his fascination with planes has remained. When the job at Stansted came up, it was the scale and breadth of the role at his ‘local’ airport, and the opportunity to work with experienced industry colleagues, that really appealed.

Matching funding to growth and being suitably flexible to accommodate the unknown is high on the list of business issues most likely to keep Richardson awake at night, alongside ensuring investments generate the best returns, given changes and evolution in consumer behaviour. Air travel is hardly synonymous with saving the planet, nonetheless sustainability is another big preoccupation. 

The airport has committed to being net zero by 2038 and has a number of initiatives underway, including a recently-opened drive-through EV charging facility, supporting airlines’ use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in line with industry commitments, and growing use and production of green energy – it recently received planning permission for its own solar farm. 

“Those are the things that I’m most focused on because they are existential threats to the sector if we don’t get it right. We need to show we are a good environmental corporate citizen as well as a sustainable and competitive business and that comes from a balanced and proportionate assessment of how we grow, develop and change.” 

• James Richardson was one of the senior leaders for Inspiring Future Leaders, an ICAEW programme, which connects senior finance leaders with ICAEW’s younger members through a series of virtual round tables covering themes such as leadership, career transitions and personal branding.
• Richardson is also speaking on the panel at the Travel, Trends & Tourism event hosted by ICAEW on 29 August