For the last decade, China's civil aviation sector has undergone rapid transformation and unprecedented growth. Between 2005 and 2010, the average annual growth of air passengers was more than 13 percent per year. In 2010, total air passengers almost doubled that of 2005, reaching 609 million1 (CAAC, 2007 and 2011). The number of airports has increased from 142 to 190 for the same period. The country has a commercial airline fleet of 2,600 aircraft and is expected to order more than 2,000 aircraft over the next five years, resulting in a fleet of more than 4,500 aircraft by the end of 2015 (CAPA, 2011). According to Chinese aviation officials, 56 new airports are expected to be built in the next five years (Perrett, 2011). China's goal is to build 240 airports to attain 1.5 hour drive range to an airport for more than 80 percent of the national county-level administrative units and to provide an efficient access to air services for more than 82 percent of the China's population (CCAR, 2009). However, China's airport industry still faces tremendous challenges in fulfilling its modernization program. These challenges range from imbalanced airport development between large hub airports and underdeveloped regional airports, fierce competition from other modes of transportation such as high-speed rail and new freeways (Liu, 2009), and how to maximize airport infrastucture throughput for individual new airports to meet China's long-term air travel demand. This paper examines the issues of China's latest air traffic growth and the massive ongoing new airport building program. The focus is to analyze how China could maximize its new airport throughput capacity with respect to new runway configuation designs in order to pursue a modernized and well-balanced airport expansion system nationwide toward its strategic and long-term aviation growth.
An Analysis of Airport Runway Designs to Maximize New Airport Throughput to Meet China's Long-Term Air Travel Demand
Ninth Asia Pacific Transportation Development Conference ; 2012 ; Chongqing, China
2012-06-28
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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