AIRFIELD AND AIRSPACE CAPACITY AND DELAY: PROBLEMS AND ACTION AREAS. PREFACE

Research and development programs in the past have stressed aviation safety so that potential system users would accept air travel as being at least as safe as competing modes. The developers were successful but their success has been accompanied by sociological, environmental and operational problems. How to increase system capacity without degrading safety is the challenge faced by today's developers. This circular focuses on this problem. It highlights the importance of the airport airspace and system capacity problem, discusses the significant issues in sufficient depth to provide some fundamental understanding of the issues and attempts to stimulate research toward the solution of the capacity problem.