Design and Justification for Market-Based Approaches to Airport Congestion Management

Chronic delays have long plagued the international air transportation system. System delays can be reduced either by expanding capacity or restricting system demand. While capacity expansion through infrastructure investment is most often called for to reduce delays, such investments in many cases can be impractical, politically infeasible or too expensive. Thus controlling, in some way, the demand placed on the system can become attractive. However, such measures bring their own set of challenges. Using recent efforts to implement slots controls in the US for background and context, we identify many of the challenges that need to be overcome and questions that need to be answered in order to successfully implement airport congestion management measures. In many cases we provide answers to the questions or challenges either based on recent research or on our experience with the recent activities in the US.