Greening the Airport Airside Area I: Increasing Runway Capacity Without Increasing Airport Size

Abstract

The parties involved in the air transport system such as airport operators, airlines, and ATC (Air Traffic Control), the systems’ regulatory bodies at both national and international level, planners and researchers (academic and consultants) have made great efforts to provide sufficient airport runway capacity to adequately serve the continually growing demand. However, these efforts have had very limited success or have even, in many cases, been unsuccessful. In addition to the growing air transport demand, the specific environmental (mainly noise) and particularly the land take (use) constraints at many large airports both in Europe and the US have prevented the full utilisation of the designed airport runway “ultimate” and “practical” capacities. The former is defined as the maximum number of atms (air transport movements) carried out at a given runway system under conditions of constant demand for service during the specified period of time, while the latter is defined as the maximum number of atms per period of time, which enables maintaining the average delay per atm within the prescribed limit(s) (one atm is one landing or one take-off). Under the continuously growing demand, these capacity constraints have caused an increasing imbalance between demand and capacity, which has increased airport airside congestion, delays, and related costs for airlines, air passengers, and air cargo shipments.