The importance of scheduled air traffic for airport existence

Abstract

The importance of scheduled air transport for the existence of airports is a topic that is constantly relevant, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has negatively affected operations at all world airports, disrupted its regularity and thus its direct and indirect effects on the region. This work focuses on airports dependent on the operation of scheduled air transport from several perspectives. After an initial study of the available literature on the importance of scheduled air transport for the existence of airports, we defined the terms demand and supply factors of the airport influencing scheduled air transport. One of the key parts of the work is the calculation of the critical number of airport movements, which represents the break even point in the amount of production in which the airport shows no loss but also no profit. The reasons for the abolition of scheduled air services, such as the occurrence of a military conflict near the airport or insufficient research of the demand for air traffic in the area, are described in the chapter analyzing European and global airports with canceled scheduled air traffic in individual case studies. The chapter also deals with the alternative uses of airports themselves, which were forced to terminate their function for the public. Airports and their equipment are highly specialized for use in air transport operations and therefore operators and their subsequent owners often face difficulties in finding alternative uses. An essential part of this work is an analysis of the response of selected European airports to the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 and a comparison of the number of passengers carried at these airports in 2019 and 2020. The final chapter contains a summary of findings and the call to change transport policies in the benefit of airports and their protection from future aviation pitfalls such as the Covid-19 pandemic.