Dynamic Strategic Planning
4.2 Systems Perspective
regional feeder system. London/Stansted is part of both a “low-cost” system of airports and the London multi-airport system. As a rule, it is not possible to divide airport systems into self-contained subsystems or modules, as a car can be divided into the chassis, the engine block, and the drive train. Airport systems overlap. In practice, they do not have a precise definition in terms of the aviation and air transport network.
National governments classify airports in a variety of ways. However, these categories do not necessarily define the systems meaningfully. In the United States the FAA organizes airports by the relative number of passengers: it defines a “medium hub” as an airport with at least 0.25 percent, but less than 1 percent of the annual passenger boardings in the United States. This definition has little consequence for planning and development. In Japan, the governmental distinguishes between “international” airports and others, and this label has had great financial significance. Designated international airports have received far greater support from the central government than the others. However, a number of Japanese air-ports that have not been “international” officially, such Tokyo/Haneda, do in fact cater to international passengers and cargo. Here again, the governmental label does not identify the functional systems.
The essential point of discussion is that governmental jurisdictions do not define airport systems. A single jurisdiction may include two or more reasonably distinct and competitive systems. Thus, California and Germany include systems centered, respectively, on Los Angeles and San Francisco, and on Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin. Conversely, a single system may overlap several jurisdictions. The metropolitan multi-airport system around Boston includes airports in three states (Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island;
and Manchester, New Hampshire). Similarly, the feeder system for Amsterdam airport in the Netherlands extends over a large part of Britain, Belgium, and Northern France.
The consequence of this observation is that governments rarely can plan airport systems effectively. If the government encompasses several airport systems, it will find it politically difficult to choose among the possibilities, to pick “winners” among the competitive sys-tems. This explains why the U.S. NPIAS is a nonselective assembly of proposed develop-ments of individual airports. This docudevelop-ments aggregates projects from the “bottom up,” as indicated in the previous section. On the other hand, if the government controls only part of the airport system, it may not be able to have a decisive impact on it.
Planning Airport Systems
In the late twentieth century, many national governments had a substantial effect on their airport systems. They were particularly able to develop regional airports. Typically, the na-tional ministry in charge of transportation or aviation would use its resources to invest in provincial projects. Thus
• Australia built excellent facilities in the capital cities of each state and territory.
• Canada invested heavily throughout its provinces and territories, most notably con-structing Montreal/Mirabel, then the airport with the largest area of property in the world.
• Japan endowed each prefecture with a series of remarkable airports, leveling moun-tains, filling in valleys, and creating airport islands at Hiroshima, Osaka, and Nagoya.
• Mexico built international airports at coastal resort areas throughout the country, strongly promoting the development of tourism in Cancun, Cabo San Lucas, and similar sites.
• The United States taxed airline tickets, placed the proceeds in the Airport and Air-way Trust Fund, and used this money to improve airside facilities throughout the United States.
Directive national planning of airport systems is generally obsolete, however. Most na-tions have judged that they can no longer afford to subsidize such programs. Indeed, many regional airport projects sponsored by national planning were plainly not economically ef-ficient, however desirable they might have been from a political perspective. Their traffic would never have justified the investments. The development of Montreal/Mirabel airport offers a prime example: built by Transport Canada as a second airport, it never served more than a few million annual passengers. When Aéroports de Montréal took over the city’s airports, it concentrated all scheduled traffic at Montreal/Trudeau, effectively closing Mira-bel. Such “white elephants” led to a drive for economic efficiency and reduction of airport subsidies. The result has been the breakup of government-owned national airport groups into local companies and authorities, as in Australia, Canada, and Mexico. Thus, the op-portunities for national planning of airport systems are largely gone.
Many metropolitan authorities have also developed second airports as part of multi-air-port systems.1Their general practice has been to use the revenues provided by major inter-national airports to finance these projects. Typically, these secondary facilities took a long time to build up traffic. They were often financially premature and economically ineffi-cient, asChap. 5discusses in detail. Thus
• The Aéroports de Paris built Paris/de Gaulle to be the premier facility for France, yet this platform took a generation to overtake Paris/Orly as the busiest airport for the region.
• The British Airport Authority (as the government agency later replaced by the privatized BAA) built London/Stansted airport, which remained largely underutil-ized compared to its design for 15 years.
• The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built major new facilities at New York/Newark and had a major passenger building built that remained totally unused for over a decade.
• The FAA built Washington/Dulles and attempted unsuccessfully to build up signi-ficant traffic for almost 20 years.
Long-term subsidized investments in major facilities are likely to be rare in the privat-ized environment of the early twenty-first century. Airport authorities or companies that have to raise money in the private sector are replacing governmental bodies that acted as if they could afford to disregard interest payments. The British Airports Authority is now a company, BAA plc. The U.S. government transferred its responsibilities for the Wash-ington airports to the Metropolitan WashWash-ington Airports Authority. Privatization limits the opportunities for planning and developing multi-airport systems.
Privatization is leading to the end of airport systems planning as it was practiced in the twentieth century outside the United States. The national governmental bodies that could direct airport development are disappearing, and the local and regional airport authorities are increasingly required to justify projects for secondary airports to demanding private in-vestors. What will be the airport systems planning of the future?
The inevitable consequence of privatization is that private, local interests prevail. Airport planning in the future is likely to focus increasingly on the development of individual air-ports. Planning efforts will focus on increasing each airport’s competitive advantage over other airports. To the extent that a competitive market economy maximizes the public wel-fare, this is desirable. However, airports do suffer from congestion and create externalities.
Basic economics tells us that, under these circumstances, competition is not necessarily in the overall best interests of society, of a nation or a region specifically.
Airport planning in the twenty-first century is likely in practice to be narrowly defined around the development of the airport facilities under the control of a single authority or company. The focus will be on the configuration of the airfield; the set of passenger build-ings; the supporting people movers, baggage, and communication systems; the complex of cargo and maintenance facilities, and the modes of access. The remainder of this chapter assumes this perspective.
Airport companies might eventually evolve into large international operators of major airports. They could in this case develop strategies for developing airports as part of a co-herent global system competing with other chains of airport operators. So far, however, international airport companies such as Abertis or GMR manage independent airport oper-ations (Table 1.12). Currently, the large integrated cargo shippers such as UPS and FedEx appear to be closer to planning for their systems of cargo hubs. How this will develop is an open question. Who knows what the future will bring?