Airport Master Planning

Until now, the airport master plan as the detailed blueprint that guides the development strategy has been discussed. However, Airport Master Planning has proven to be ineffective to develop a long-term development for airports. It is necessary to develop alternative approaches for the long term development of airports (Kwakkel et al., 2010).

The main cause of problems in the master planning process is the uncertainty element (Kwakkel, Walker, & Marchau, 2010), and this forecasting failure manifests itself in a variety of ways. Examples of uncertainties in large-scale transport systems, as airports are, technological, economic, and regulatory changes, industrial changes, political changes, etc. But, an airport master plan also includes a lot

A famous example of such an airport project is that of Montreal Mirabel Airport (YMX). This airport was constructed in 1975 and it was expected to serve 40 million passengers by 2025. This airport unfortunately failed in attracting the necessary traffic to support continuing operations, and was closed to passenger traffic in 2004 (Chambers, 2007). Overly pessimistic or generous traffic forecast can negatively affect the size and engineering characteristics of the transportation system. Another example is the Sky train in Bangkok. This project suffers from oversized platforms, not enough cars, and multi-million dollar inefficiencies because the passenger forecasts exceeded the actual traffic levels by 250% (Flyvbjerg, 2009). The literature shows that airport systems are particularly prone to these forecasting difficulties. Maldonado (Maldonado, 2009) showed in a study that traffic forecasts for major New England airports (US) showed an average discrepancy between predicted and actual traffic of 23% for five-year forecasts and 78% for fifteen-years

Airports depending primarily on a single airline are very sensitive because their number of passengers and the number of aircraft movements depend largely on the success, failure, or divestiture from their home carrier. Mergers between airlines mergers and hub restructuring van also have similar effects. As example we can take the merger between KLM and Air France and the possible decision to shift its base to Paris/Charles de Gaule (CDG).

Planners can deal in several ways with the inefficacy of Airport Master Planning. It is possible to postpone or speed up projects because the Master Plan consists of many semi-independent capital investment projects (de Neufville & Odoni, 2003). The other possibility is to make operational adjustments when the real circumstances deviate too much from the underlying Master Plan. The Australian Airport Act, for example, specifies that the Master Plan needs to be formally updated every five years, what makes that a stepwise adaptation is possible when conditions change (Kwakkel J. H.,