A New Way to Indicate Airport Airside Performance from an Economic Perspective

AbstractAirport capacity is a key performance indicator for the ability of the airport to handle an expected traffic demand. The classical way to quote airport capacities and flows on the airside is to count the number of potential airframe movements per unit of time (e.g. per hour or per year). This approach seems to be historically reasonable from a perspective of planning and organizing predicted aircraft movements and available airside resources.However from an economic point of view a more sophisticated indicator system could be beneficial to represent and compare future airport performance. The method presented here uses additional parameters like aircraft size, number of passengers, cargo load or value of passengers (e.g. premium vs. economy) to indicate the economic performance of the airport system (social welfare optimization). The results can be used to address possible improvements in ATM with respect to economic relevance for the operational air traffic stakeholders (airport, airline, air navigation service provider).Since a single flight movement is now differently rated regarding to the calculated airport performance contribution, it is expected that the accompanied prioritization procedures could significantly influence airline and airport operations. Further on, the mutual dependencies between airlines (concurrent demand for sufficient airport resources) and airline-airport (provide efficient air transport) will be emphasized in a transparent and reliable way. To exemplarily show the consequences and the benefits of the introduced metric exemplarily, we will use different airports (airport categories, runway configurations and operational scenarios), different parameter settings (short/medium/long haul flights, heavy/medium/light aircraft) and relevant combination of the identified input parameters. Special emphasis will be given to the discussion of the weighting of parameters depending on the needs of the stakeholders in air traffic management and in air transportation.It will be sketched how the results of the new method can be used in various time horizons for planning airside movements at an airport, i.e. from pre-tactical flow management in a performance based airport management environment to the evaluation of long-term strategic expansion options of an airport. A comparison of a set of airports having similar performance using the conventional capacity scale will demonstrate the significance of the new indicator set and the possibilities of its application