European Connectivity: the role played by small airports

The objective of this work is to evaluate the role played by small airports in European connectivity. The recent European economic crisis has triggered in several countries a discussion about the costs and benefits of maintaining small airports. It is well recognized that those airports play an important role for connecting remote communities. However, on the one hand their low traffic levels are generally insufficient for allowing a fully recovery of the high fixed costs and on the others they are usually publicly owned. So, their losses fall to the taxpayers. In this work we aim to estimate the connectivity loss for the population caused by closing airports with capacity lower than 2 million passengers per year. They represent ¾ of all operating European airports. We apply a methodology based on computing the quickest travel time necessary to connect each origin municipality to any destination in Europe. It includes three components: i) the travel time by road to access the departure airport, ii) the travel time by flight from the departure airport to the destination airport, including waiting times in intermediate airports when no direct flight is available, and iii) the travel time by road from the destination airport to the final municipality of destination. For each of over 70,000 municipalities in Europe we calculate the average travel time to reach any other municipality in two cases: i) including all airports operating in Europe and ii) considering only airports offering more than 2 million seats per year. Preliminary results show that, with the exception of the Scandinavian countries, the average loss of connectivity is small on a country level. However, that average is unevenly distributed: several regions in France, Spain and Italy sustain a very significant increase in the average travel time to connect to the rest of Europe by up to 70%