A critical comparison of airport capacity studies

Airport traffic management should solve a trade-off between minimising congestion and maximising capacity: different methods are available in the literature to assess the maximum traffic flow that an airport infrastructure can manage under satisfactory conditions.The paper compares the output from two approaches currently adopted to compute airport capacity: the Advisory Circular AC 150/5060-5 and the AirTOp Fast Time Simulator (FTS). An Italian airport with a high volume of traffic has been considered in order to analyse two layouts.The baseline scenario represents the current operating airport layout, while the what-if scenario implies geometrical and functional improvements (ie a new runway and modified operating conditions are considered). For a given Level of Service and different reference periods, saturation and sustainable capacities were calculated.The comparison of the obtained capacities allows evaluating the reliability of the obtained results and evaluating the potential capacity gains of the infrastructure. Particularly, the results demonstrate that the simpler Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) methodologies could accurately estimate both baseline and what-if hourly capacities; the more complex FTS is, however, necessary to calculate reliable daily and annual capacity values because of the real traffic demand during the periods of time. All input data was provided by the airport management body: the results are reliable and could be transposed to similar conditions.