Global business and tourism depend heavily on the efficient operation of airports and movement of passengers, baggage, and cargo across many areas. With increasing demand and connectivity requirements for airports comes the need for more sophisticated simulation and modeling tools to validate design assumptions. Furthermore, airport design and planning decisions have significant impacts on policy and major capital improvement decisions, which can be supported by simulation and modeling tools at many leve...

Airports — especially in the past two decades—have generally sought to promote and increase collaboration among the members of the airport community, particularly between an airport and its airlines. One metric of this trend has been the increase in the number of U.S. airports with full-time emergency managers, from fewer than 10 in 2007 to more than 120 today. Collaboration and increased professionalism in airport emergency management have gone hand in hand. No matter whether the incident is aircraft-re...

Airports continually balance demands to improve infrastructure within the realities of available budgets. Green revolving funds (GRFs) offer an alternative approach for investing in projects that generate operational savings. These funds work by tracking verified cost reductions from implemented actions, and then transferring those savings to a reserve that provides capital for future qualified projects such as energy system upgrades. A number of universities have managed GRFs for over a decade. Municipa...

“Pavement condition data” are essential inputs to the process of managing airport pavements and ensuring safe operations. The technology available today to collect pavement condition data is considerably different from that available even 20 years ago, and new technologies are being developed and introduced into practice at a rapid pace. ACRP Research Report 203: Guidelines for Collecting, Applying, and Maintaining Pavement Condition Data at Airports provides guidance on the collection, use, maintenance,...

Although general aviation airports have historically been funded by federal, state, and local entities, the private sector is increasingly playing a larger role. This involvement has ranged on a continuum from service and management contracts to singular projects at airports that involve leasing mechanisms to long-term leases and the whole-scale private development of general aviation airports. In an era of declining resources and increasingly scrutinized public expenditures, private-sector involvement i...

"Upgauging” is an airline industry technique enabling air carriers to increase capacity by adding seats to existing jets and replacing smaller planes with larger ones. While these practices are generally the result of airline network and system-wide strategies, their impacts are often experienced at the local level by the airport community. Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Synthesis 97: How Airports Plan for Changing Aircraft Capacity: The Effects of Upgauging explores a broad concept of airli...

Some concrete pavements commonly used at airports are susceptible to the destructive effects of alkali-silica reaction ( ASR).  The presence of ASR on concrete pavements can have a devastating effect on pavement performance, not only in terms of reduced functionality, but also in terms of shortened service lives.  The focus of  ACRP Synthesis 96:   Practices to Mitigate Alkali-Silica Reaction (ASR) Affected Pavements at Airports is on current practices for mitigating ASR in affected ...

One of the most challenging environmental issues facing the aviation industry today is the impact of jet fuel emissions on the global climate. The use of sustainable alternative jet fuels (SAJF) to reduce aircraft emissions will become significantly more important in coming years. Capturing the air quality benefits in a way that is useful to airports requires understanding how SAJF reduce pollutant emissions, quantifying the reduction, and demonstrating the impact through an easy-to-use tool that airport...

Resources to help promote interest in aviation among younger populations ranging from 10 years old to 25 years old are detailed in TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Research Report 202 . The report is designed to help educators and aviation enthusiasts understand the need for encouraging interest in aviation. It offers guidance on developing a program of activities to fit particular needs and provides activities for developing a program that can be scaled and tailored for various age grou...

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Web-Only Document 40 outlines the key research gaps and areas of topics of interest for airports in the design and construction field over the next five years. The research ideas generated as part of this project are organized into seven high‐level themes that represent the main areas and challenges of interest to airports in design and construction. While design and construction are designated as their own research areas within the ACRP program, the road...