The race between airport capacity and demandHaving been less evident for a few years, airport congestion is back; its impact more acute than ever. Some relief is expected from the concerted actions of all stakeholders, but demand for air travel will outpace airport capacity expansions. As such, congestion will increasingly influence air transport development in the next decade. Since the 1970s when the first 747s were introduced, air traffic has increased ten-fold, doubling in volume every 15 years, from 500 billion Revenue Passenger Kilometres (RPKs) in 1970 to more than four trillion RPKs today. It will double again in the next 15 years, reaching nine trillion RPKs by 2020. Airport capacity is unlikely to double in the next 15 years. The global hub cities will experience some congestion relief with the dispersion of certain services and the opening of more direct flights between secondary cities. However, most of these new routes will still almost always involve a global hub city on one side or the other. As highlighted earlier, traffic demand from the mega-cities will have doubled by the turn of the next decade, with these mega-cities getting bigger, richer and with more international mobility among their populations. These global hub cities are where increasingly large numbers of people live and work, as well as being where most people want to travel from and to. Airport congestion is caused by growing and concentrated demand, the desire for frequency of service, and the resulting pressure on infrastructure, including airports and ATC systems. This has become a constraint that will increasingly influence how airlines respond to future demand. Congestion is causing serious operational disruptions, with a growing number of delayed departures and arrivals, not to mention the knock-on implications across networks. These result in significant economic penalties for most of the systems stakeholders, including airlines and passengers, as well as a significant amount of wasted fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Both the scale of congestion and the number of airports affected are increasing. Although there was some relief from congestion resulting from the slow-down in traffic post 2001, the number of delayed flights caused by congestion has sharply increased over the last few years. This is partly due to competitive pressure that led to more regional aircraft and lower demand between 2001 and 2003, which reduced the average capacity of US aircraft to 137 seats, down from about 160 a decade ago. In Europe, 23% of flights are now delayed. In the US around a third of flights are delayed with an average of 62 minutes. The three large airports in New York are the worst for late flights in the US. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is advocating larger aircraft size as one key way to reduce delays and the proposed minimum average size could reduce delays at La Guardia airport by 37%. In China, some 7,000 people per day take one of the forty flights on the busy Beijing to Shanghai route. A seat on this route is already a hot commodity, with load factors at an impressive 84%. Demand is expected to grow at an average of 12.4% per year until 2015, by which time some 17,600 travellers will be making the journey. Given the distance between the two cities, it is unlikely that there will be large transfer to any possible future high-speed train on this route. If the average capacity of aircraft on this route were to remain the same as today, it would require over 110 frequencies per day, or one departure every ten minutes, to satisfy the demand: a level never achieved, even for the most efficient shuttle operations on the eastern US corridor. Assuming an optimistic frequency of one flight every 15 minutes, or 72 flights over the 18-hour operational span of airports eight years from now, this would require an average aircraft size of 290 seats, equivalent to the A330. In reality, as demand will be driven by the peaks and troughs of daily and possibly even seasonal demand, it will be served by aircraft ranging from single-aisle to VLA. By 2015, in addition to the Beijing-Shanghai route, Beijing airport will serve over 180 domestic and international cities. Larger capacity aircraft will bring significant relief from all of these issues, including environment constraints like noise, which currently limits 32% of European airports. The attention given to reducing the noise of new aircraft means that bigger will also mean quieter, on a cumulative basis. For example, the A380 not only carries more payload, it also reduces the noise footprint by almost 50%, or 3.3 square kilometres, compared to the largest aircraft previously available. The A380 noise footprint is now contained within the airport perimeter. Airports will rely more and more on the noise-efficiency of new generation aircraft, as environmental constraints become increasingly acute. Given the difficulties of opening new airports or expanding current facilities in developed countries, managing capacity expansion on the ground will largely depend on using what we already have more efficiently. Air traffic control and aircraft productivity, either through better turnaround time or increased size, will have to contribute to the capacity expansion. Large and fast growing flows of traffic will be the most constrained by congestion. These are the flows with most airports constrained on either side of the city-pairs, such as Europe-North America, Asia-Europe and Asia-North America. This means that a significant portion of the traffic growth will need to be accommodated by an increase of aircraft seating capacity rather than frequency. The longer the flight, the more limit there is to increasing frequencies. On long-haul flights, even as short as those across the North Atlantic, airlines can stimulate traffic on a particular route by offering more departure times. As a result it is common to see an airline offering two to three flights per day on the same route, leaving within three to four hours of each other. However, offering more than three daily long-haul flights creates diminishing returns; bringing marginal benefits to both the airline and its passengers, while substantially increasing the airline’s marginal costs. As a result, once a sufficient number of daily frequencies is reached, the best response to any additional growth in passenger demand is to provide larger aircraft on the route. This GMF conservatively assumes that ATC and airports will be able to meet the challenging task of capacity expansion although a number of airports, about 90 worldwide, will find the challenge increasingly more difficult. In this case, the baseline GMF scenario indicates demand for a total of 1,283 passenger VLA, such as the A380, and 1,615 intermediate twin-aisles, such as the A350-1000 XWB. However, if congestion worsens or becomes very severe, there will be demand for greater numbers of larger, more eco-efficient aircraft, across all segments from regional and single-aisle to VLA. Where the congested airports of the base case become even more congested, and other airports are added as congestion intensifies, 1,528 VLA will be required. In a more severe high congestion scenario, 1,771 VLA will be needed. |
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