Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
E
NVIRONMENTAL
AND
ECONOMIC
FACTORS
IN
AIRPORT
CAPACITY
Joop Krul,
Schiphol Airport
Introduction
All major institutes expect that air traffic in Europe will double during the next 15
to 20 years. There will be an ongoing concentration of the major alliances on a lim-
ited number of hubs. However, hub capacity in Europe is scarce, and airport devel-
opment on most of these hubs is seriously lagging behind. Delays of air traffic due
to airport restrictions will get worse and their share in total delays will be growing.
So, capacity problems in the air, caused by the patchwork of European air traffic
control, will increasingly become a problem caused by lack of capacity on the ground.
Substitution to high-speed trains will become important, but offers no real capacity
relief for European airport capacity. Trains might, in the future, substitute only 5 to
10 per cent of total European air traffic. This means that creating airport capacity
for future demand, mostly on existing hubs, will become the biggest challenge for
airport operators and airlines in the present decade.
Getting political approval for new runways, terminals and other major facilities
in Europe can take 10 to 15 years and, in some cases, even longer. Extensive consul-
tation, public inquiries and environmental studies and reviews are required, and even
then it may take much more time before the new runway or facility can be built, due
to long-lasting land purchase procedures. Moreover, all big airports in Europe are envi-
ronmentally constrained. This problem is, however, not exclusively European: world-
wide, the number of airports with some form of environmental constraint is fast
growing. According to the comprehensive Boeing database, airports worldwide impose
over 350 restrictions, varying from curfews, to quota, charges, levies and budgets.
There is no evidence that this might change. On the contrary, creating airport
capacity for the growing demand of air traffic is, in general, only possible if at the same
time airports can prove that the environmental impact for the community will not
be worse or, in most cases, will become better. If the social and economic effects have
proven to be positive, further development may be possible.
To keep this balance positive, airports have to play in a complex setting with many
actors, many decision-makers, strong opinion leaders and often opposing communi-
ties involved. While for expansion and development the focus is mostly on the hard-
ware (planes, engines and runways), compensation and mitigation is generally found
in extending the software (procedures, standards and measurements). However, the
real problem is in the
mind ware
: the image, the perception that the local people and
their politicians have regarding further growth of the airport and their reaction towards
its expansion.
There are also some serious economic threats to continuing airport expansion.
In the first place, there is the decreasing value of large-scale hubs, especially when they
have reached a scale where people begin to question if further capacity will still add
value to their community. This is especially the case when more capacity and more
noise lead to more transfer traffic, and communities do not see a direct interest for
