Development of a generic airport for determining runway capacity

Abstract

From the global perspective Air Traffic has grown rapidly during the last decades and in the coming decades this trend will continue. A rising demand will therefore also result in an increasing number of aircraft movements. Already today there are many airports such as London Heathrow, which operate at its maximum capacity. These Airports have to think about capacity enhancing measures that can meet the fast growing demand in the long run. Due to many restrictions and regulations the option of building a new runway or even a new airport has become very difficult nowadays and can take up to several years or even a decade. Especially aircraft noise and noise abatement moves sharply in focus and generates even more restriction, which are required by a new building. Based on these facts airports need to overcome capacity bottlenecks arising for the period until the completion of the new runway or airport. There are several technologies and procedures which can be used as capacity enhancing measures to tackle both the problem of long term planning and capacity shortage. Due to the circumstances that every airport is very individual in its infrastructure and traffic demand it is difficult to find a way to compare capacity enhancing measures based on their influence on runway capacity in general. All studies are designed for the individual airport and there is no overall comparison, which fit to more than one airport. The intention of this Paper is to build a generic airport, which gives a first sufficient trend to the effect of a capacity enhancement measure on runway capacity, which can be used for comparison. Similarities between airports are examined with regard to runway infrastructure like runway length, runway configuration or position of the runways to each other. Also commonalities relating to traffic structure including a frequency distribution of the Arrival/Departure rate and traffic mix will be analyzed and integrated in the design of a generic airport. Particular during peak hours the traffic structure can vary greatly and in some cases can have a strong influence on runway capacity. Overall this approach is needed to create a baseline for further analysis and simulations to determine the influence of different capacity enhancing measures on runway capacity.