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SCALABILITY OF THE AIR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM AND
DEVELOPMENT OF MULTI-AIRPORT SYSTEMS:

A WORLDWIDE PERSPECTIVE
Philippe A. Bonnefoy and R. John Hansman
This report is based on the Doctoral Dissertation of Philippe A. Bonnefoy submitted to the
Engineering Systems Division in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The work presented in this report was also conducted
in collaboration with the members of the Doctoral Committee:
Prof. R. John Hansman (Chair)
Prof. Cynthia Barnhart
Prof. Richard de Neufville
Prof. Amedeo Odoni
Report No. ICAT-2008-02

May 2008
MIT International Center for Air Transportation (ICAT)
Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
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SCALABILITY OF THE AIR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM AND

DEVELOPMENT OF MULTI-AIRPORT SYSTEMS:
A WORLDWIDE PERSPECTIVE
by
Philippe A. Bonnefoy and Prof. R. John Hansman
ABSTRACT
ith the growing demand for air transportation and the limited ability to increase
capacity at some key points in the air transportation system, there are concerns
that in the future the system will not scale to meet demand. This situation will result in
the generation and the propagation of delays throughout the system, impacting
passengers quality of travel and more broadly the economy. This thesis proposes the
investigation of the mechanisms by which the air transportation system has scaled to
meet demand in the past and is expected to do so in the future using a multi-level
engineering systems approach.
The air transportation system was first analyzed at the U.S. national level using
network abstractions. In order to investigate limits in scaling of the U.S. air transportation
network, theories of scale-free and scalable networks were used. It was found that the
U.S. air transportation network was not scale-free due to capacity constraints at major
airports, also preventing it from being scalable. However, the construction and analysis of
a new network for which sets of two or more significant airports that serve passenger
traffic in a metropolitan region (i.e. multi-airport systems) were aggregated into single
nodes showed that it was scale-free and scalable. These results were also supported by a
time series analysis of airport and multi-airport system growth. These analyses
demonstrated the importance of regional level scaling mechanisms (i.e. development of
multi-airport systems) in the ability of the air transportation system to adapt and scale to
meet demand.
Given the importance of multi-airport systems, an in-depth multiple-case study
analysis of 59 multi-airport systems worldwide was performed. This analysis was used to
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develop a feedback model that captures the fundamental processes that govern the
evolution of multi-airport systems.
Multi-airport systems were found to evolve according to two fundamental
mechanisms: (1) the construction of new airports and (2) the emergence of secondary
airports through the use of existing non-utilized airports. Several differences and
similarities in the occurrence of these dynamics were identified across world regions. It
was found that in the United States and Europe, the construction of new large airports
occurred prior to or during World War II and to a minor extent during the 1960s and
1970s. More recently, significant limitations to the development of new airports (e.g.
opposition from local communities) and changes in the airline industry (e.g. emergence
and growth of low-cost carriers) led multi-airport systems in the United States and
Europe to evolve through the emergence of secondary airports. In the Asia-Pacific region,
multi-airport systems have predominantly evolved through the construction of new
airports, due to fewer available airports, high projections of demand and weaker
opposition to the construction of airports.
The analyses and insights from this thesis were also used to analyze and better
understand the evolution of future multi-airport systems and provide recommendations
for infrastructure management policies and multi-airport system development strategies.
In the United States and in Europe, there is the need to protect non-utilized exiting
airport infrastructure (both civil and military airports) that can later be used to
accommodate demand through the emergence of secondary airports. In parts of Asia
where the existing under-utilized airport infrastructure is weak and where projections of
high volume of demand -with high uncertainty- are high, there is the need to apply a
dynamic approach to develop multi-airport systems. This approach includes actions such
as reserving land area for future airport development and keeping original airports open
since this option has proven to be useful and successful in the other regions of the world
(i.e. United States and Europe). In some parts of Asia, such as India, where the military
airport infrastructure is more developed than in other parts, there is also the need, as in
the United States and Europe, to protect these airports since they may become future
secondary airports following the airport status conversion dynamics that were observed in
Europe.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) under grant NAG-1-2038 (NASA Langley) and cooperative agreement
NNA06CN24A, by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under contract DTFA0101-C-00030D.0#16 and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada.
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SCALABILITY OF THE AIR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM AND

DEVELOPMENT OF MULTI-AIRPORT SYSTEMS:

Philippe A. Bonnefoy and R. John Hansman

Report No. ICAT-2008-02

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SCALABILITY OF THE AIR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM AND

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