Airports

Hubbing and Rehubbing at JFK International Airport – The ALIGATOR Model

Mark Hansen
Kanafani, Adib
1989

This research, sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, involved the development and application of a model of International Gateway Competition, to be used for purposes of airport demand forecasting and airline strategy assessment. The model, named ALIGATER (AirLine International Gateway Traffic Estimator) simulates and finds Nash equilibrium states for competition between a set profit maximizing airlines. Inputs to the model include airline characteristics, including network type, gateway location, strength of feed to gateways, and aircraft characteristics; passenger...

Cost Economics of Aircraft Size

Wei, Wenbin
Mark Hansen
1993

The authors study the relationship between aircraft cost and size for large commercial passenger jets. Based on a translog model, they develop an econometric cost function for aircraft operating cost and find that economies of aircraft size and stage length exist at the sample mean of their data set, and that for any given stage length there is an optimal size, which increases with stage length. The scale properties of the cost function are changed considerably if pilot unit cost is treated as endogenous, since it is correlated with size. The cost-minimising aircraft size is therefore...

Airlines and Airport Ground Access: Current Arrangements and Future Opportunities

Rhoades, Krista
Mehndiratta, Shomik
Mark Hansen
1994

One of the most critical issues facing the airport system today is ground access. Nearly every airplane trip begins and ends with the use of an automobile. It is estimated that over 90 percent of airline passenger trips to or from the airport are by private automobile or taxi. This estimate is almost 100 percent at the medium or smaller airports since these communities tend not to have comparable alternatives to the automobile. It is recognized that airport ground access is a major issue and in some cases a constraint to airport development or airside capacity. In order to accommodate the...

Improvements to Airport Ground Access and Behavior of Multiple Airport System: BART Extension to San Francisco International Airport

Monteiro, Ana Beatriz Figueiredo
Mark Hansen
1996

Metropolitan regions with more than one major airport—multiple airport systems (MASs)—are important to the U.S. air transport system because of the large number of passengers they serve. Airport ground access factors strongly influence the allocation of traffic in MASs. The effects of improvements to airport ground access (by nonautomobile modes) on airport use in a MAS are analyzed. A case study of an extension of a Bay Area Rapid Transit rail link into the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is presented. Two airport choice models were developed. One is a nested logit model in...

Consequences of Strategic Alliances Between International Airlines: The Case of Swissair and SAS

Youssef, Waleed
Mark Hansen
1994

The impact of the SAS-Swissair strategic alliance on service quality, market concentration, and fares is assessed. Comparison of services before and after the alliance show increases in flights between the SAS and Swissair hubs, in the number of markets in which the alliance airlines offer connecting service, and in the average service frequency offered in these markets. Further, there has been an overall reduction in the layover time associated with SAS-Swissair connecting services. Impacts of market concentration include effective monopolization of nonstop services between the alliance...

Multivariate Analysis of the Impacts of NAS Investments: A Case Study of a Major Capacity Expansion at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport

Mark Hansen
Wei, Wenbin
1998

This paper presents a case study of how to empirically estimate the impact of a NAS investment on system performance. We employ multivariate statistical analysis to estimate the impacts of a major capacity expansion at DFW airport.

Multivariate Analysis of the Impacts of NAS Investments: A Case Study of a Major Capacity Expansion at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport

Mark Hansen
Wei, Wenbin
1998

This paper presents a case study of how to empirically estimate the impact of a NAS investment on system performance. We employ multivariate statistical analysis to estimate the impacts of a major capacity expansion at DFW airport.

Trajectory-based Air Traffic Management (TB-ATM) under Weather Uncertainty

Nilim, Arnab
Ghaoui, Laurent El
Mark Hansen
Duong, Vu
2001

Explosive growth of commercial air travel poses great challenges to air traffic management and causes increasing delays. Much of the delay is weather induced. The traditional routing strategy, which consists of an aircraft under a predicted storm avoiding the bad weather zone completely, is too conservative. One way to reduce delays caused by enroute weather is to take a less conservative route, risking higher delay to attain a better expected delay, instead of avoiding the bad weather zone completely. In order to implement this strategy, one approach involves shifting the current airspace-...

Prospects for Increasing Average Aircraft Size at Congested Airports

Gosling, Geoffrey D.
Mark Hansen
2001
It has been common for airport traffic forecasts to assume a continuing increase in average aircraft size in the future so that the anticipated growth in passenger demand will not result in a proportional increase in aircraft operations. However, to understand the likely future trends in average aircraft size, as well as strategies that an airport might pursue to encourage airlines to use larger equipment, it is necessary to understand the competitive dynamics of the various markets served by the airport and the factors that determine the size of equipment that airlines will use in those...

Aviation Infrastructure Performance and Airline cost: A Statistical Cost Estimation Approach

Mark Hansen
Gillen, David
Djafarian-Tehrani, Reza
2001

The relationship between the performance of the US National Airspace System (NAS) and airline costs is examined by estimating airline cost functions that include NAS performance metrics as arguments, using quarterly data for 10 US domestic airlines. Performance metrics that vary by airline and quarter are developed by applying principal component analysis to seven underlying variables, including average delay, delay variance, and the proportion of flights that is cancelled. This analysis reveals that variation in the seven variables can be adequately captured by three or fewer factors,...