Measuring Airport Landside Capacity

At the request of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Transportation Research Board (TRB) undertook to develop guidelines for assessing the landside capacity of individual airports. A special 18-member committee, representing airport operators, airlines, and airport planning and design professionals, directed and participated in this study. This paper reviews the study's principal findings and recommendations, presented in the final report published in September 1987. An airport's landside capacity is its capability to accommodate passengers, visitors, air cargo, ground access vehicles, and parked or parking aircraft. Of these, the broad demands of air passengers traveling between their homes, offices, and other points of departure to the aircraft--or in the opposite direction when their aircraft arrives and they deplane--are most important to judging capacity at most commercial service airports; and they are the focus of the study. Airport passengers, then, are in most cases the basis for measuring landside capacity. Nevertheless, at some airports employee access and parking, cargo operations, or aircraft servicing may become constraining. While airport operators, airlines, and passengers may often recognize when an airport's landside facilities and services are approaching the limits of their ability to accommodate additional demand, there are no generally accepted procedures and standards for judging airport landside capacity. Current FAA forecasts of more than 70% growth over the next decade in the annual number of airline passengers in the U.S. indicate that consistent bases for making decisions about operation and development of airport landside facilities will continue to be needed. Research to collect data on service conditions over the wide variety of airports, passenger markets, and airline operations should be undertaken to support development of landside service-level measures that can be used by airport operators, airlines, and the FAA to make consistent decisions about needs for airport facilities.