Radom

Radom's most revealing asset is the one critics mock most: an airport that lost PLN 678.71 on every passenger it handled in 2023. Officially, Radom is a Masovian city about 100 kilometres south of Warsaw, sitting 159 metres above sea level. Warsaw statistical-office data reported by Polish business media show the city had fallen from nearly 231,000 residents in 1999 to about 196,000 in 2023. Standard profiles stop at the 1976 protests, the old industrial base, or the fact that Warsaw is close. What they miss is that Radom is being rebuilt as a redundancy node for the Polish state: a reserve runway south of the capital, a reserve industrial base for defence orders, and a city kept relevant by deliberate capital allocation rather than market gravity alone.

The airport is the clearest example. Rynek Lotniczy calculated that Warsaw-Radom Airport handled only 103,418 passengers in 2023 while losing about PLN 70.2 million, or PLN 678.71 per traveller. In September 2025 the Supreme Audit Office said Polskie Porty Lotnicze had spent over PLN 738 million on the airport without economic rationale and on the basis of unrealistic traffic forecasts. Read as a standalone business, the project looks wasteful. Read as state redundancy, it looks different: Poland keeps paying for spare aviation capacity outside Warsaw even when the spare seat looks empty.

Radom's other anchor pushes in the same direction. In January 2025 state-owned Fabryka Broni "Lucznik" signed a PLN 25.96 million robotization and digitization project, backed by PLN 8.36 million from the Ministry of State Assets, to raise output and competitiveness in arms production. That is the deeper pattern. A shrinking secondary city is being assigned a defendable niche in aviation spillover and weapons manufacturing, with public money doing the niche construction.

The mechanism is redundancy reinforced by niche construction and resource allocation. Radom behaves like a camel: expensive reserves look inefficient in ordinary weather, but they matter when the main route is saturated or the environment turns hostile. The business lesson is that backup capacity never looks rational on a quarterly spreadsheet. It starts to look rational when the primary hub becomes a strategic risk.