By Shannon Steffke
Staff writer
Ask an airport director what keeps them up at night, and the answer rarely starts with runways or regulations. More often it starts with people—or the persistent lack of them.
Staffing has become one of the most pervasive and persistent challenges in airport operations today. Finding qualified personnel is difficult enough. Retaining them is harder still. And when it comes to the specialized demands of airside operations, particularly on the Air Operations Area (AOA), the stakes of getting it wrong aren’t measured in productivity metrics, they’re measured in lives.
The Staffing Crisis Isn’t Going Away
The aviation industry has faced a well-documented workforce shortage for years, and it is not easing. ACI World, the global trade representative of airports, has formally acknowledged that attracting and retaining staff is now one of the industry’s most urgent long-term challenges, significant enough that ACI established a dedicated Task Force on Airport Workforce to study medium- and long-term solutions. Its conclusion: the availability of a trained, competent workforce is critical to ensuring that increasing demand in aircraft movements can be accommodated safely, securely, and efficiently.
The data on retention tells its own story. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), turnover rates in ground handling operations reach as high as 50% industry-wide, a figure that makes sustainable, consistent operations extraordinarily difficult to maintain.
For airside roles specifically, the problem is compounded by something most industries don’t face: the time it takes to clear someone for access. Vetting procedures for workers who will operate beyond security perimeters are rigorous by necessity, requiring extensive background reviews that can take months to complete. An airport can’t simply backfill an airside position the way it might fill a role elsewhere.
For many airports, the gap between the staffing they have and the staffing they need creates a chronic condition: operations stretched thin, safety margins under pressure, and directors spending time and budget on workforce issues instead of the work of running an airport.
The common workarounds, temporary staffing agencies, short-term contract crews, voluntary overtime, introduce their own risks. Workers unfamiliar with a specific airport’s layout, procedures, and culture are a liability, not a solution. And the economics of constant turnover are punishing: the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates that replacing a skilled employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary, a figure that compounds quickly when turnover becomes a recurring operational condition rather than an exception.
The AOA Doesn’t Forgive Mistakes
The AOA is not a forgiving environment. It is a highly controlled area where the consequences of inattention, miscommunication, or inadequate oversight can be catastrophic. Effective safety support in this environment demands more than bodies on the ground. It demands expertise, consistency, and unwavering operational discipline.
During construction projects and active work zones, the need for experienced AOA safety personnel becomes even more important. Flaggers must hold their position with focus. Escorts must maintain situational awareness across an active movement area. Barricade crews must understand not just where the boundaries are, but why they matter. And Resident Project Representatives must have the authority, training, and composure to manage access and compliance without disrupting the pace of an active construction project.
That function cannot be delegated to whoever is available. It requires professionals who have done this work before, many times, at many airports, and who bring that institutional knowledge with them from day one.
Regulations add another layer of pressure. Any airport that serves commercial flights has to follow FAA Part 139, and that’s not a box you check once and forget. It covers everything from runway safety to firefighting readiness to wildlife control, and airports now have to maintain a formal safety management system, too. If an airport falls out of compliance, the FAA can fine it for every single day the problem continues, and in serious cases, can even shut the airport down.
Construction makes this even harder. The FAA has specific rules for keeping airports safe during construction projects, covering who’s allowed near the runways, how work zones get secured, and what paperwork proves everything was done correctly. None of these rules pause just because a contractor is on-site. If oversight slips during construction, that’s exposure the airport carries, with the FAA, with airlines, and with the public.
Built By Someone Who Knows People
Alder Airfield Services was founded in 2020 by Ali Munzer, a former educator and teen therapist who brought something unusual to the airfield safety space: a deep, professional understanding of what makes workers show up well, and what makes them disengage, burn out, or simply not come back.
What Munzer observed at her previous AOA job, lack of communication, no collaboration, and no pride in the importance of the work being done, became the blueprint for what Alder would deliberately not be. She built Alder around the conviction that worker mental wellness and operational safety are not separate concerns.
The results speak for themselves. Alder has maintained a near-perfect safety record since its founding, working with some of the world’s largest and busiest airports as well as small local airfields.
In an industry where IATA reports that nearly 60% of ground operations professionals feel they don’t have enough qualified staff to ensure smooth operations, Alder has built a workforce that keeps coming back.
Most of Alder’s workers are either permanent, full-time employees or temp workers who regularly sign up for shifts, not because they have to, but because the environment Alder has built is one where they want to be.
That distinction matters enormously to airport directors. A flagger or escort who understands why their role matters, who feels respected and supported on the job, and who has worked an active airfield dozens of times before is a fundamentally different resource than a temp worker filling a shift. The former brings presence, awareness, and accountability. The latter brings risk.
Alder offers airport construction teams a full suite of airside safety services, flagging, escorting, barricading, and Resident Project Representative support, all delivered by people who take pride in the work and understand the environment they’re operating in. The team takes control of access back and forth from the jobsite to mitigate human error, keeping construction crews moving efficiently and aircraft operations uncompromised.
One Less Burden
When an airport brings in Alder, they are not adding another management challenge to an already full plate. They are removing one. The recruiting, credentialing, scheduling, and supervision of AOA safety personnel becomes Alder’s problem, and Alder has been solving it since 2020.
Alder’s role on the AOA is designed to be a behind-the-scenes function. The best safety support doesn’t call attention to itself. It moves quietly in the background, monitoring, managing risk, controlling access, maintaining the buffer between construction activity and active aircraft movement, so that the airport can continue to function at a high level without visible disruption. When Alder is doing its job well, passengers don’t notice, airlines don’t notice and the director doesn’t get calls.
That invisibility is the point.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Directors who have navigated AOA incidents understand something that those who haven’t often figure out too late: the cost of inadequate safety oversight is almost never limited to the incident itself.
There are the immediate operational impacts: delays, diversions, potential closures. Followed by the regulatory consequences: FAA investigations, compliance findings, and financial penalties that add up daily. There is the reputational damage to the airport and the professional exposure for the individuals responsible for its safety program. And in the most serious cases, there is the irreversible human cost.
Every one of those outcomes is what effective AOA safety support is designed to prevent. It doesn’t make the headlines because it keeps incidents from becoming them.
The workforce economics are equally clear. IATA has reported that nearly 60% of ground handling professionals say they don’t have enough qualified staff to ensure smooth operations, and 27% fear that their current employees will leave soon. When specialized safety personnel do leave, the cost of replacing them compounds quickly. SHRM research puts total replacement costs for skilled employees at up to twice their annual salary, accounting not just for recruiting and onboarding expenses but for the productivity gap during the vacancy and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door.
Recruiting, vetting, training, and managing specialized airside safety personnel, only to lose them to a larger airport or a higher-paying operator, costs airports far more than the investment in a capable, experienced partner who arrives ready to work, brings their own institutional knowledge, and stays accountable to results.
More Than A Staffing Fix
For airport directors who realize chronic staffing pressure is an occupational fact of life, the availability of a reliable AOA safety partner represents something more fundamental than a staffing solution. It’s a structural change in how they operate.
ACI World has been direct about the reality: the aviation ecosystem is strongly reliant on a large workforce of well-trained, competent professionals in adequate numbers, and ensuring that workforce is in place is critical to safe, secure, and efficient operations. For most airports, building and sustaining that workforce internally for a specialized function like AOA safety is an ongoing drain on leadership attention and operational budget.
Alder has solved that problem by building a company where people want to work and where safety is a product of culture, not just compliance. That difference is felt on the airfield every day. And it’s why the airports Alder partners with keep coming back.
With Alder managing the AOA safety function, directors can redirect their attention to the broader strategic and operational tasks of running their airports. The energy spent on recruiting, training, scheduling, and managing specialized safety staff, and on managing the anxiety of coverage gaps, can be focused elsewhere.
The stress doesn’t disappear from airport operations. But one significant, persistent source of it does.
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