INTERVIEW: LGW Single minded P www.PassengerTerminalToday.com Ahead of PTE World 2026 in London, Pierre-Hugues Schmit , the new CEO of London Gatwick, Europe’s busiest single-runway airport, tells PTW his plans lease tell us about your career path so far. Before starting as London Gatwick chief executive, I was chief commercial and operational officer at Vinci Airports for eight years. This role covered the entire Vinci Airports portfolio of 70 airports in 14 countries. I oversaw a broad range of activities, from airport operations to air service development, commercial services and cargo. While at Vinci, I was also a non-executive director on the London Gatwick board, so I was already familiar with many key business issues and operational areas of focus at the airport. Prior to joining Vinci, I worked in different environments, but all were related to aviation. My first job, more than 25 years ago, was flight dispatch on a French aircraft carrier. After some civil aviation academic training, I worked at the French CAA for seven years. Then I was an advisor to the French Transportation Minister, before joining Aéroports de Paris as deputy director of the general aviation department, responsible for the operation of 12 small airports in the Paris area. I left there in 2013 to co-found a French airline, before joining Vinci in 2017. And your current role? One of the most important aspects of my role is making sure London Gatwick continues to be the airport for everyone. Making air travel efficient, accessible and affordable for all is very important to me. As we increase the number of flights and passengers on an already extremely busy runway, the challenge is to maintain our strong quality of service and our competitive cost structure. My other big challenge is to engage our Northern Runway plan, for which we just received approval from the UK government, while keeping our operations at least at today’s level of service and performance. Our Northern Runway plan includes moving the runway (currently used as JANUARY 2026 Passenger Terminal World 63
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