Airline Network Development in Europe and its Implications for Airport Planning

The ongoing deregulation and liberalization of worldwide air transport markets confronts airport planners with an increasingly problematic context. On the one hand, the capital intensive, large-scale and complex airport investments need a detailed, long/medium-term planning of airport infrastructure. Such planning requires at least predictable traffic volumes (and traffic composition) within the planning horizon. On the other hand, airline route networks are increasingly dynamic structures that frequently show discontinuous changes. As a consequence, the much more volatile airport traffic restricts the value of detailed traffic forecasts. Volatility of airport traffic and its composition requires flexibility of airport strategies and planning processes. The book explores this dilemma through a detailed study of airline network development, airport connectivity and airport planning in the deregulated EU air transport market. The questions the book seeks to answer are: · how have airlines responded to the regime changes in EU aviation with respect to the configuration of their route networks? · what has been the impact of the reconfiguration of airline network configurations for the connectivity of EU airports? · how can airport planners and airport authorities deal with the increasingly uncertain airline network behaviour in Europe?

1: Introduction; 2: Air Transport Networks; 3: The Spatial Configuration of Airline Networks in Europe 1; 4: The Temporal Configuration of Airline Networks in Europe 1; 5: Intermezzo: The Spatial-Temporal Configuration of Airline Networks; 6: Airline Cases; 7: The Impact of Airline Network Configurations on the EU Airport Hierarchy; 8: Airport Planning in a Free-Market Regime; 9: Flexible Strategic Planning: The Case of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol; 10: Conclusions

Guillaume Burghouwt is a researcher at Amsterdam Aviation Economics, the air transport research cluster of SEO Economic Research, and academic director of Airneth, the worldwide scientific network on aviation research and policy. His key expertise concerns airline network development, connectivity studies, scenario analyses and airport planning issues. He has been engaged in many research and consultancy projects on air transport and has organized various international conferences and seminars on air transport policy and research. Between 2000 and 2005 he worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In February 2005 he completed his PhD research on airline network development and airport planning.