SPEAR Workshop 2026

From August 16th to August 19th, I attended a workshop at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) concerning improving resilience in airport operations.

The workshop was supported by NSF Award Number 2533731 titled Collaborative Research Network for Enhancing Airport Resilience Science and Operation, which was awarded to University of Florida faculty (UF) to support the organization and coordination of this workshop.

The purpose of the workshop was to gather a group of experts in academia, private industry, and the aviation industry to study the problem of resilience in airport operations. There were representatives from Tampa airport (TPA) and Gainesville airport (GNV), but the focus was on the operations of the DFW airport itself as an experimental test bed.

Resilience is a growing study of how to not just mitigate the risk of things that can impede an operation, but how to bounce back that much quicker whenever a disruption appears. The distinction between robustness and resilience is an important nuance, as the study of resilience is largely threat agnostic, being concerned instead with the question of what techniques can be put into place to bounce back to “normal” operation levels. In aviation terms, an example of resilience is the time to return to target “capacity” when an inclement weather event such as flash flooding occurs.

All of the experts invited to the workshop brainstormed a myriad of problems and solution pathways to tackling resilience in various components of the DFW operation, questions that are transferrable to many other airport operations even if the details therein can vary wildly according to the specific conditions of each airport (the expression goes in sailing: “show me a seaport, and you have shown me only one seaport”). The output of this workshop is a set of perspective papers in the proces of being written after the workshop (as of the time of this writing) and to be published in the Fall of 2026.

You can access the agenda of the workshop from clicking the banner image above or the link here.