Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and undeveloped land as well as to reme-
diate damaged sites and ensure land use
compatibility with airport activity.
•
Wildlife
: Adverse impacts on wildlife
habitat and populations. The objective is
to avoid-minimize-mitigate such impacts,
to prevent the attraction of wildlife on air-
craft operation areas and create or promote
wildlife habitats where there is no risk of
aircraft hazards.
•
Local Climate
: Heat islands due to the ar-
tificial thermal loading of surfaces. The ob-
jective is to avoid-minimize-mitigate the
impacts of heat islands effects on the health
and welfare of neighboring communities.
include functions not covered by other
categories.
Implementation Strategy
Airports are by nature significantly different from
one another. All commercial airports however
consist of similar components, which make the
development of a generic method appropriate. A
modular structure addresses the singularity of each
particular project. It allows decision-makers to
combine their own set of modules, i.e. their own
combination of criteria clusters, to address the
specific scale of any individual project and the
airport functional categories that are involved.
For example, airports that do not use de-icing
equipment may simply omit the inclusion of the
de-icing criteria cluster.
The concept is applicable when several plan-
ning and design options are under consideration
and expected to leave different environmental
footprints. In any case, decision-makers should be
in agreement regarding the goal and scope of the
development project as well as its requirements
on other grounds such as economic viability,
social responsibility, and operational efficiency
(including safety and capacity). End-users may
include individuals such as airport managers,
planners, designers, and public figures (local,
regional or national).
In a typical planning process for preparing
an airport master plan, the application of these
concepts would follow preliminary impact studies
that consider a number of alternatives and precede
detailed regulatory reviews of the selected master
plan's environmental consequences (Figure 1).
The preparation of preliminary impact studies
benefits this evaluation process as it provides data
for the performance indicators used in the evalua-
tion process. From a stakeholder perspective, using
environmental indicators is less data-intensive
and hence, enables an active involvement by all
interested parties. For instance, representatives
Our analysis addresses environmental impacts
caused by activity in five functional areas:
•
Airfield
includes areas of aircraft opera-
tion: runways, taxiways, ramps, and re-
mote parking.
•
Ground Support Equipment (GSE)
in-
cludes airport and aircraft support services.
Typical GSEs are: aircraft pushback trac-
tor, conditioned air unit, air start unit, bag-
gage tug, belt loader, bobtail, cargo loader,
cart, deicer, forklift, fuel truck, ground
power units (GPU), lavatory cart, lava-
tory truck, lift, maintenance truck, service
truck, bus, car, pickup truck, van, and wa-
ter truck (U.S. EPA, 1999).
•
Terminal Facilities
includes concourses,
gates, check-in and baggage claim areas,
cargo terminals, and ancillary offices.
•
Ground Transportation
includes parking
garages, public transit stations and access
roads.
•
General Planning
refers to all general as-
pects of infrastructure design and develop-
ment that typically involve more than one
of the other distinct categories. It may also
