European air transport public service obligations: a periodic review

The ‘Third Package’ of European Union air transport liberalisation measures came into effect on 1 January 1993 and has substantially reduced the restrictions on interstate flight operations. The package of measures also includes provision for the member states to impose ‘public service obligations’ on low-density routes which were deemed necessary for the purposes of regional development. In this paper, it is this legislation which is the main focus of attention. In the second section, the background to and contents of the ‘Third Package’ are reviewed. The competitive implications of these measures are briefly outlined. In Section III, the legislation relating to public service obligation routes is critically examined. The Irish government was first to invoke this legislation and several difficulties have come to light as a result. In the final section, recommendations on improvements to the legislation are proposed, based largely on the equivalent US ‘Essential Air Services’ (EAS) programme.

Carrier Network Structures and the Spatial Distribution of Air Traffic in the European Air Transport Market, 1996-2006

This paper characterises and compares the spatial distribution of air traffic in the US and Europe across the network of airports for both continents for the period 1996 to 2006, using annual airline schedules from the Official Airline Guide databases. Several measures of traffic concentration are presented. By decomposing the overall spatial distribution of traffic, aspects of individual airline behaviour may be measured and contrasted, along with measures of multi-market contact among groups of carriers. European and US airlines are characterised in terms of their network strategies and the extent of network competition that they face.

Employment sub-centres and the choice of mode of travel to work in the Dublin region

Travel-to-work mode choice patterns are analysed for a number of key employment sub-centres in the Dublin region. Geographical Information System (GIS) visualisations and regression analysis are used to identify a small number of employment sub-centres using a large sample of travel-to- work data from the 2002 Census of Population, modified with travel-specific data by the Dublin Transportation Office. The journey to work is then analysed across these employment sub-centres in the context of a travel mode choice model. The estimation results illustrate the varying effects that travel attributes such as travel time and travel cost have on the choice of mode of travel across employment destinations highlighting the role of trip destination as a main driver of travel behaviour in the Dublin region.

\u3ci\u3eThe Symposium Proceedings of the 1998 Air Transport Research Group (ATRG), Volume 2\u3c/i\u3e

UNOAI Report 98-4https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/facultybooks/1153/thumbnail.jp

\u3ci\u3eThe Symposium Proceedings of the 1998 Air Transport Research Group (ATRG), Volume 3\u3c/i\u3e

UNOAI Report 98-5https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/facultybooks/1157/thumbnail.jp

Air transport liberalisation and airport dependency: developing a composite index

Air transport liberalisation in Europe has produced some major changes to the networks operated by airlines and the services available at airports. Within this context the degree of airport dependency in terms of market, spatial and temporal concentration is important to know from an economic geography and risk management perspective. A composite index called the Airport Dependency Index (ADI) is developed to measure airport dependency based on the concept of the relative Gini coefficient. Liberalisation has had varying impacts depending on the size and type of airport and so a comparison is made of the degree of dependency at a large sample of European airports using the ADI. The ADI has the potential to provide insight on the sustainability and worthiness of financing airport projects, and on whether airports should diversify further their activities by investing in the growth and expansion of their network

British airways’ move to Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport: A statistical analysis of transfer baggage performance

This article was published in the serial, Journal of Air Transport Management [© Elsevier]. The definitive version is available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699710000876This paper investigates transfer baggage performance when British Airways’ occupancy of Terminal 5 at London Heathrow Airport took place. Operational data on transfer baggage performance are collated from BA performance scorecards and the Gini coefficient is used as a measure of consolidation of flight operations within a single terminal and in the investigation of correlation of consolidated flights in Terminal 5 with transfer baggage performance variation. The relationship between consolidation of operations in the terminal and improving transfer baggage performance is found to be significant. In addition, there is evidence of significant changes in transfer baggage performance on switch phases of flights as they were moved to Terminal 5 in steps. The exclusive use of a terminal gives improved performance

Up in the air: Barriers to greener air traffic control and infrastructure lock-in in a complex socio-technical system

AbstractGreater automation of air traffic control (ATC) could reduce aviation's climate change impacts, but improvements predicted long ago have been slow to happen. This resistance to ATC modernisation is framed as an issue of lock-in, and the detailed case study described here enables an analysis of the factors involved in slowing change. Although the classic lock-in effects of ‘increasing returns’ and ‘network externalities’ are important, a major barrier to modernisation is due to the political and organisational challenges of coordinating change across a large, complex socio-technical system. However, lock-in effects are crucial with respect to the perceived increasing returns accrued from experience with manual ATC operations, and the difficulty of quantifying the risks of automation (particularly as regard the use of complex software) is a major barrier to further improvements. Overcoming this obstacle to further automation depends on finding ways to test and operate new ATC software and procedures without compromising safety