Future of Airport Construction in the 21st Century



Future of Airport Construction in the 21st Century

Abstract

The successful airport design deals with the efficient airport operations that which include aircraft landing and taking off, crew and payload loading, passenger and cargo handling. Also, the design must take the safety standards for ensuring security of the cargo and passenger. As, over the past few years, air traffic have been increased drastically, the efficient design of airport becomes critical for the survival and improvement of efficiency of the aviation business. This paper discusses few challenges and requirements of the future construction of airports.

Introduction

Airport is the main component of air transportation system, being the physical location where air and surface transfer of cargo and passengers takes place. In the 21st century, the airport design must focus on the demanding needs of passengers. The design must provide with the efficient of fundamental airport operations such as landing and takeoff of aircraft, handling of passengers, cargo and crew. In addition, the airport must accommodate the advanced aircraft and navigation technologies (Lee, Y.H., 2011).

The governments all over the world, including US have been planning to invest billions of Dollars for developing the modern infrastructure of the airports. The next section of the paper discusses few requirements for the construction of future airports.

Future Aspects of Airport Construction

Future developments of Airports will include modifications in all the major areas and functionalities that an airport serves. The three main scenarios which can be considered, as the drivers of change for airport construction include changes in airport traffic, the infrastructure for supporting the enhanced traffic loads, and the methodologies used for managing these issues (Nuefville, R.D., 2000). As the governments are interested to reserve high amounts of funds for the purpose of modified construction of airports, and it has also become the major concern of the airline industry; therefore, there are no economical constraints for the innovative and technologically advanced airport construction.

During the last 50 years, air traffic has increased up to 8% year for US, this increase in traffic is valid for the whole world in general. This increasing traffic load is the significant factor on which modern airport's infrastructure depends. To meet with the demands of the increased number of passengers, the capacity of airports have been increasing. For 21st century, the airport's area will be an important factor, the area of the passenger building, the landing area, the cargo handling area, all will be taken into consideration.

In the 21st century, the airport as a complete will be modified in its design. The airside of the airports will be impacted, as the length, orientation and spacing of the runways will be modified. The landside will be impacted as the changes will be made to improve the efficiency of passenger building configurations.

Over the last decade, modern aircraft has been manufactured. The dimensions of these aircraft are longer, taller and wider than the usual. Also, these planes include the number of landing gears for supporting the extra weight (Agarwal, ...