They are different things entirely. Failure of a mall is not that bad compared to the mismanagement of investments for an airport.
You can build a mall technically anywhere you have land. You can also build them up close to tall buildings where you’ll have office workers and apartment residents as captive customers. You can build a mall in weird shapes to accommodate the area you have.
For an airport, you can’t have tall buildings all around it. Planes need to land. The area must be wide enough for the runway. You need to have space and access to all types of transportation infrastructure - cars, buses, and trains (if possible). You need lots of ancillary services like aircraft maintenance hangers, fire departments, and airline offices. In the Philippines, the Air Force likes to use the airport infrastructure for the proximity and convenience to aircraft services, save money, and share air space.
Malls are private enterprises, the risks of success and failure are on the developer. Mall operation is a dynamic business, with lots of variety, experimentation, innovation, evolution, successes, failures, and building life cycles starting and ending.
Airports are public investments, very large, very expensive, and the risk of failure is very high so the planning should be more careful. There really should only be 2 international airports per metropolitan area as the air space per airport is quite large. Some places have 3, but its dubious and probably unnecessary like in New York (air traffic would be better if La Guardia was closed).
Once in operation, they can’t really stop for a significant period of time. Planes are coming and going all day everyday, year after year. Airports also need to have foresight into future expansion, this is very difficult.
For example, no one predicted the 9–11 attacks and the expansion of the terminal floor area for security reasons, and the need for more amenities close to the gates as people spend more hours inside security. Many airports built before 9–11 are small and uncomfortable to be in for long hours.
NAIA is not that bad compared with older American and European airports, but it is bad compared with newer Asian airports.
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