Montreal hosted the 13th Sustainable Airport Areas International Conference on October 1 and 2, 2026. A look back at two days of discussion between airport operators, governments, industry and researchers.

For decades, airports were designed to be crossed as quickly as possible. The discussions held in Montreal this month suggest that this model is reaching its limits.Pendant des décennies, les aéroports ont été conçus pour que l’on y passe le moins de temps possible. Les discussions tenues à Montréal ce mois-ci laissent entrevoir les limites de ce modèle.

The 13th edition of SAAIC, organised by Innovitech with Aéroports de Montréal and CEEVO, brought together delegations from Europe, Asia and North America. It was the first time the conference came to Montreal, and only the second time it was held in North America. Over two days, five panels looked at the diversification of airport land, agri-food, advanced air mobility, multimodality, energy and digital technology.

In his opening remarks, Innovitech CEO Sofiane Benyouci argued that the most underrated asset of an airport is its capacity to convene: when everyone needs to be at the table, the airport owns the table. His closing synthesis added an important qualification. Owning the table does not guarantee that anyone will sit down at it. Throughout the presentations, three conditions came back again and again: access to power, the quality of data, and public trust.

Airports as territorial platforms

The scale of the projects presented says a lot about where the industry is going. Narita is nearly doubling its land area, from about 1,200 to 2,300 hectares, and plans an airport city that could create up to 53,000 jobs. In Finland, the Vantaa airport district is expected to grow from 40,000 to 70,000 jobs. Closer to home, YMX Innovation is turning an existing airport site into a campus for air mobility, robotics, energy and defence.

Agri-food, a sector few people associated with airports ten years ago, received a full panel. The reasons are practical: perishable products, cold chain requirements and fast access to large markets. Vantaa, which still has around 4,000 hectares of farmland within city limits, also frames the subject as a matter of food security. Airports and agriculture have long competed for the same land. They may now have reasons to cooperate.

Several speakers nonetheless warned against diversification for its own sake. An airport is not an advantage in itself; what matters is how well its assets match the strengths of the surrounding region. Atlanta’s food cluster is a good example. It started with a farmers’ market in 1959 and only reached today’s automated distribution centres after more than sixty years of gradual layering.

A less visible pattern also emerged. Behind each of the most advanced airport cities, there is a dedicated governance structure: a joint organisation with the prefecture in Narita, a regional alliance in Vantaa, shared airport, provincial and federal funding in Winnipeg. In practice, diversification is a governance exercise first, and a real-estate exercise second.

Multimodality followed the same logic. In Paris, restrictions on short domestic flights and competition from hubs outside Europe have turned rail into a partner of the airport rather than a rival. On the cargo side, one speaker summed up the issue well: an airport is competitive not because goods arrive there, but because they don’t stay there. For airport areas, the corollary is worth stating. Goods should move on quickly, but part of the value they generate should remain in the territory.

Power, the new constraint

If one figure from the conference deserves attention, it came from Denver. The airport’s peak demand, around 59 MW, already exceeds its firm supply of roughly 50 MW, and the gap could reach about 84 MW around 2030. A single new rental car facility, built mainly to charge electric fleets, could require up to 40 MW on its own. Utilities, meanwhile, need five to seven years to deliver new capacity, which is longer than most construction schedules.

Quebec is not immune. Despite abundant hydroelectricity, research carried out at Montréal-Trudeau shows that electrification is pushing peak demand toward the limits of the grid, and that an expansion program is a short window to build energy into the design rather than add it later at a higher cost.Le Québec n’est pas à l’abri. Malgré l’abondance de l’hydroélectricité, les recherches menées à Montréal-Trudeau montrent que l’électrification pousse la demande de pointe vers les limites du réseau et qu’un programme d’agrandissement offre une courte fenêtre pour intégrer l’énergie dès la conception, plutôt que de l’ajouter plus tard à un coût supérieur.

The consequence goes beyond operations. The availability of megawatts is increasingly deciding which industries can set up near an airport, and which cannot.

For a century, airports were organised around the runway. The next generation may well be organised around the substation.

Energy therefore has to be planned like a master plan, over thirty years, covering heat and cold as well as electricity. Sometimes the solution lies underground: at Schiphol, aquifer thermal energy storage already supplies 8.1 MW of cooling to data centres. Data centres themselves illustrate the ambiguity of the moment. They can share infrastructure and supply waste heat, but they also compete for the same scarce capacity. A positive relationship is possible, though it has to be designed deliberately. Some airports, Denver among them, now treat on-site generation as a revenue opportunity rather than a resilience cost, a sign that airports are slowly becoming energy platforms and not just energy consumers.

Data before artificial intelligence

On technology, the consensus was unusually strong, considering that it came from operators, engineers, researchers and integrators alike. Projects that succeed start from a concrete operational problem, not from a technology looking for a use. Several speakers made the same point in different words: the real subject is data, more than AI. Without reliable and shared data, artificial intelligence tends to amplify the fragmentation of an organisation instead of fixing it.

Hong Kong offered the most complete example, with a single digital identity for the passenger journey and a shared data platform for a cargo community that used to re-enter the same shipment information many times over. The sequence observed in most cases is the same: reliable data first, then decision support, then targeted automation, with people keeping control of exceptions.

Two implications deserve more attention. The first is governance: data only creates value when it is shared between the airport, airlines, handlers, customs and the city, which raises the question of who governs it. The second concerns people. In an industry facing labour shortages, automation is also a way to make the remaining jobs more attractive, which makes it a talent issue as much as an efficiency issue.

Trust, the real test for air mobility

Advanced air mobility showed how much trust matters. China is moving very fast: the low-altitude economy is now a national priority, the market is projected at RMB 2 trillion by 2030, and tickets for passenger eVTOL flights are already on sale. Canada is building its regulatory framework in stages, with more than 123,000 drones registered so far. The European, North American and Chinese certification systems are unlikely to converge soon.

The Val d’Oise delegation suggested a pragmatic response: a territory can remain neutral with regard to certification. Whatever standard prevails, aircraft will need places to land, maintenance capacity, trained technicians, organised low-altitude airspace and residents who accept them. Preparing this ground layer reduces risk for the entire industry.

Technology is certified in laboratories, but it is accepted in neighbourhoods.

Social acceptance takes years to build and can be lost very quickly. Speakers therefore recommended starting with uses whose public value is obvious: medical transport and emergencies first, then logistics, and passenger services only later. Inclusion is part of the same equation. Hong Kong, for instance, keeps alternative processes open for travellers who do not wish to use biometrics.

Resilience, the theme nobody scheduled

No panel was devoted to resilience or security, yet the subject came up in almost every presentation. Edmonton mentioned wildfires, northern operations and a future air force base. Vantaa raised food security and a planned rail tunnel that would also protect critical cables. YMX is developing a secure enclave for dual-use defence technologies, and cargo operators presented sea-air routes as a fallback when shipping lanes are disrupted.

After thirty years in which efficiency and just-in-time logistics set the agenda, redundancy and spare capacity are regaining value. Edmonton’s approach to land use summarises the shift:

Every acre should support today’s operation, strengthen resilience, or preserve a future option.

Governments increasingly see airports as strategic assets and not only as economic engines. That changes how they are funded, and who has a say in their development.

A question of timing

Taken together, these discussions point to a common difficulty. Energy is planned over thirty years, utilities need five to seven years, construction three to five, technology evolves every eighteen months and political cycles last four years. Pilot projects that never scale up, buildings designed before their power supply is secured, substations that arrive too late: in each case, the timelines of the different partners simply do not line up.

The airport is arguably the best placed institution to synchronise them, since it manages operations minute by minute while planning for the next fifty years. In his closing remarks, Sofiane Benyouci put it this way:

“Convening is not just about hosting the meeting. It is about setting the tempo.”

This has consequences for leadership. Hong Kong described its role as that of an ecosystem orchestrator, and the expression fits the direction taken by many airports. Their leaders now have to deal with utilities, data and local communities as much as with airlines. They also have to manage lasting tensions between speed and public consent, growth and decarbonisation, land development and the preservation of future options, automation and human expertise. New indicators will probably be needed as well, such as value created per hectare or energy resilience, alongside passenger and cargo volumes.Cette évolution a des conséquences sur le leadership. Hong Kong a décrit son rôle comme celui d’un orchestrateur d’écosystème, une expression qui correspond à la direction prise par de nombreux aéroports. Leurs dirigeants doivent désormais composer avec les fournisseurs d’électricité, les données et les communautés locales autant qu’avec les compagnies aériennes. Ils doivent aussi gérer des tensions durables entre rapidité et adhésion du public, croissance et décarbonation, développement foncier et préservation des options futures, automatisation et expertise humaine. De nouveaux indicateurs seront probablement nécessaires, comme la valeur créée par hectare ou la résilience énergétique, en complément des volumes de passagers et de fret.

Five questions for airport boards

Rather than conclusions, the conference raised a few questions that every airport board could usefully ask:

What does the region do better than anyone else, and is airport land being used to support it?
Is the megawatt gap for 2030 known, and who is working on it with the airport?
Is the data reliable enough to automate even one operational decision?
Which new technology would neighbouring communities actually welcome?
Which parcels of land are about to be committed that may be needed in 2050?

Next steps

Innovitech intends to discuss with its partners how the SAAIC network could keep working between editions, in particular on airports as energy hubs, data governance and the ground infrastructure needed for air mobility. The TransAtlantique accelerator, launched during the conference with a 2027 cohort focused on energy transition in mobility hubs, offers a first concrete opportunity.

The conditions for the next stage are now well identified: power, data and trust. The work ahead is to put them in place.

Innovitech thanks all speakers and moderators, Aéroports de Montréal, CEEVO, as well as the partners and sponsors who made this edition possible.Les conditions de la prochaine étape sont désormais bien définies : l’énergie, les données et la confiance. Le travail à venir consiste à les mettre en place.

About Innovitech

Innovitech is a Montreal-based strategy and innovation consulting firm. It works with governments, airports, industry and innovation ecosystems in aerospace, advanced air mobility, defence and security, industrial decarbonisation and health technology.

Power, Data, Trust: What SAAIC 2026 Revealed About the Future of Airports