IN Brief:
- Egis has appointed Shakir Khaja as aviation sector director for Europe and Africa.
- The role focuses on airport sector expansion, with emphasis on the UK, Ireland, and wider European market.
- The appointment comes as airport clients balance capacity, sustainability, resilience, and operational readiness.
Egis has appointed Shakir Khaja as aviation sector director for Europe and Africa, strengthening its airport consulting, engineering, delivery, and operations capability across a market facing renewed capacity and sustainability pressures.
Khaja will oversee the company’s expansion across the airport sector, with a strategic focus on the UK, Ireland, and wider Europe. Based in London, he brings more than 25 years of international aviation experience, including work on major airport programmes and initiatives for Heathrow, London City Airport, and Fraport Greece.
The appointment supports Egis’ wider aviation activity across consulting, design, engineering, programme management, and operational readiness. The company’s aviation work covers airport planning, infrastructure delivery, air traffic and operational systems, decarbonisation, resilience, and asset optimisation.
Airport construction is entering a demanding phase. Passenger demand has recovered across many markets, but capacity expansion remains politically sensitive, carbon constrained, and operationally complex. Operators are having to improve throughput, security, baggage systems, passenger experience, surface access, energy infrastructure, and resilience while keeping live terminals, aprons, and critical systems running.
The UK market is particularly active, with the King’s Speech including a Civil Aviation Bill intended to unlock airport expansion. At the same time, airport operators continue to assess how planning, noise, carbon, surface transport, grid capacity, and local economic conditions affect future investment.
That pipeline is not limited to new terminals. It also includes stand upgrades, baggage systems, security infrastructure, airfield works, terminal reconfiguration, digital systems, energy projects, utilities resilience, and operational-readiness programmes. Many of those packages are technically complex even when they do not carry the visibility of a headline expansion scheme.
Transport infrastructure is increasingly being delivered through longer-term improvement programmes rather than isolated capital projects. The pattern is visible outside aviation too, including in TfL’s £700m station upgrade framework, where multiple contractors have been appointed to support station upgrades across a live network.
Airport work brings its own construction pressures. Security restrictions, airside access, passenger flows, night working, asset protection, operational handbacks, and strict safety procedures can all affect productivity and programme sequencing. Even contained packages may require coordination across airlines, handlers, security providers, regulators, local authorities, transport bodies, and infrastructure owners.
Khaja’s appointment places experienced sector leadership around those challenges as Egis looks to grow. Airport clients need support that can connect strategy with deliverable projects, particularly where capacity growth, sustainability, passenger experience, and operational continuity have to be addressed together.
For contractors and consultants, the aviation market offers substantial opportunity but requires a specific blend of design coordination, programme control, live-environment delivery, systems knowledge, stakeholder management, and carbon-aware asset planning. Airport infrastructure is rarely forgiving when construction planning fails to account for the operational environment around it.
