Economic Impact Modeling of Flood-Related Airport Disruptions: A Prototype for Integrated Resilience

As a part of NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project, this memorandum provides a brief methodology to calculate the economic damages of lengthy airport disruptions related to flooding and storm surge events in the United States. Using three benchmark events (Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Ian, and Superstorm Sandy), we extract the timeline and extent of aviation disruption. To simulate a hypothetical shutdown, we calculate the daily revenue losses from both the airport and the airlines, and multiply these by daily cancellation rates to obtain a first-cut estimate of potential damages to U.S. airports and aviation. A Harveylike event would result in losses in the order of $104.8 million for SFO (San Francisco) and $84.9 million for EWR (Newark) without accounting for international revenue and local spillovers. These results motivate flood-related infrastructure investments to improve aviation resilience in the long-term.