Navigating systemic instability in aircraft turnaround: A strategic framework for complex airport ecosystems

Designers increasingly operate in volatile, complex, multi-actor systems where continuous alignment and coordinated action must be maintained despite shifting and unpredictable external conditions. Building on Extreme Design and Dynamic Stability theories, this paper investigates how these constructs can be operationalized in high-complexity socio-technical environments. The airport ecosystem—particularly aircraft turnaround—is examined as an extreme empirical case, where hundreds of tightly coupled activities must be executed within strict temporal constraints by multiple autonomous stakeholders, including airlines, airports, ground handling companies, and air traffic control authorities. This study adopts a multi-method approach, combining literature triangulation, expert interviews, speculative co-design with subsequent independent validation through industry engagement to analyze how coordination is sustained under disruption and to identify systemic drivers of instability in turnaround operations. The findings reveal persistent misalignments in ownership, fragmented execution structures, temporal dependencies, and limited adaptability across stakeholder boundaries. In response, we propose the Ownership–Execution framework as a design intervention that enables stakeholders, including aviation OEMs, to visualize, anticipate, and actively manage dynamic shifts in responsibility and execution across interconnected operational processes and decision-making contexts. By integrating Extreme Design and Dynamic Stability, this paper contributes a theoretically grounded and practically actionable framework for navigating systemic instability in complex, high-stakes socio-technical systems, offering implications for design research, practice, policy, and future interdisciplinary investigations.