Investigating utilisation of runway system capacity at a large airport

Abstract

Many large airports are faced with limited options when seeking to provide suffi cient airside and landside capacity to appropriately accommodate growing demand. In the airside area, a common problem appears to be the shortage of runway capacity. Sometimes, this causes severe aircraft/flight congestion and delays, which spread and affect large portions of the wider airline network. The common strategic option for mitigating these impacts is increasing airside capacity by building a new runway(s). In Europe, the most recently built fourth runway at Frankfurt Main airport in Germany and long-standing and increasing pressure for building a third (parallel) runway at London Heathrow airport in the UK are typical examples. But after a new runway has been built, how much is its capacity utilised? This paper deals with investigating utilisation of capacity of the runway system, particularly that of a newly built runway at a large European hub — Amsterdam Schiphol airport in The Netherlands. For this purpose, modifi ed existing analytical runway capacity model(s) are applied to calculate the ultimate capacity of the runway system. Then, the input data on demand are used to estimate the actual utilisation of the available capacity and related average aircraft/flight delays. The results indicate that, at present, the existing runway system including the new runway is far from being saturated, implying there is no need for additional physical expansion in the medium to long term. If the new runway had not been built, with the present level of demand, severe congestion and aircraft/flight delays would be a frequent occurrence