Airport Capacity Case Study: A Critical Examination of Expansion Proposals at Lexington Blue Grass Airport

This paper critically examines the Airport Master Plan for Lexington Blue Grass (LEX) Airport (located in the state of Kentucky) as a response to its airport authority's concerns about the projected capacity shortfalls and related congestion and delays. The existing Master Plan proposed several configuration alternatives (including the addition of a 9,000-foot parallel runway) and would require purchasing land in the vicinity of the airport. In the analysis of future capacity at the airport, simulation models are developed to analyze measures of performance such as capacity and delay. The analyses are done for the existing and proposed airfield configurations and two traffic demand projections (a total of four simulation scenarios), in order to establish accurate capacity and delay estimates and to propose the best airport configuration alternative. The simulation results indicate that current and projected future delays, and arrival and departure queue lengths are very low. The analysis shows that the LEX airport would benefit from increased runway-taxiway separation towards the Runway 04 threshold. Under this scenario, non-staggered arrival and departure operations would result in delay reductions. However, in all cases projected aircraft delays are so low that there is no capacity justification for a new runaway at LEX.