Analysis of General Aviation procedures at medium sized airports and theirs interactions with scheduled commercial flights

Abstract

With increasing air traffic in the next few years and limited capacities at airports, a main key factor of operating an airport is the aircraft traffic mix. General Aviation is a very special and individual part of the air traffic and will continue operating at many airports in the future. Therefore processes of General Aviation compared to scheduled flights shall be analysed and differences derived. The main goals of this paper are to examine if and how there are influences between scheduled air traffic and General Aviation and under which certain conditions General Aviation flights are sense full to consider in (pre-) tactical planning phases at airports. A survey addressing private and commercial pilots of GA is carried out to gain necessary knowledge of their procedures and to identify gaps in data transfer or communication between airport stakeholders. Further, real flight data from a typical medium sized airport are used to determine possible interactions of GA flights with commercial flights. To match these preliminary findings airports are asked exemplarily to state their experiences on this topic. First results indicate missing or only short-term generated information of General Aviation flights from the airport’s point of view compared to scheduled airline flights. An exchange of information between air traffic control, airport companies and service providers is rarely established. It seems it might be only a small segment of General Aviation flights which are affected in this kind of problems at all, and, it might be shown there are great season, week and even day dependencies existing. Nevertheless, results show in some situations it makes sense to optimize the data sharing between the above-mentioned parties to enhance the airport’s processes and allow to adapt the pilot’s arrival or departure time to low demand times in the preflight planning phase already.