ANALYSIS OF DYNAMIC SCHEDULING OF GENERAL AVIATION FOCUSING AIRPORT CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE

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. The General Aviation (GA) 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 could be considered meaningfully 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.