Overview
With growing populations and consumption rates, air traffic in Europe is expected to grow rapidly towards 2050, particularly as more people outside the continent become increasingly able to travel. However, this growth will be faced with dwindling resources, more expensive fossil fuels and stricter environmental expectations, requiring a strong vision for how the airports of the future will operate. While EU-led projects such as Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) and Clean Sky are already addressing growth expectations up to 2050, there is a need to put in place radical solutions for airport operation beyond this milestone.
With this in mind, 'The 2050+ Airport' (2050AP), a recent EU-funded project, investigated revolutionary solutions to prepare airports for 2050 and beyond
The 2050+ project aimed to prepare airports for 2050 and beyond by creating a concept development methodology (CDM) that would ultimately:
- Enable 90% of European travellers to complete their intra-European door-to-door journeys within 4 hours
- Promote cost effectiveness through low operating costs and optimal revenue
- Develop climate neutral operations and low sound pollution
Through the development of different airport concepts, the project would demonstrate what a future airport would look like when taking one of the areas as the leading objective. It would also show the benefits and challenges of the different concepts and the trade-offs between the different areas to be made. This would include descriptions of the interface between the aircraft and the ground and the new principles for the airport layout including intermodal connections.
To achieve its aims, the project team analysed a baseline reference airport and identified all operations, processes and bottlenecks that need to be improved. It then defined the methodology needed to develop the concepts and worked on validating them. The latter involved assessing the value of concept ideas vis-à-vis stakeholder needs and key performance indicators, as well as analytical methods to further refine and quantitatively assess the concepts.
The development of concrete concepts taking into account input from existing studies and input from other stakeholders like universities, research institutes, airports and industry. The project provided a scientific methodology to develop and evaluate innovative airport concepts. This methodology was based on the well-known Value Operations Methodology (VOM). Central to VOM is the idea to express the value of a concept by its performance difference compared to a reference concept. VOM further provides a high-level set of objectives and attributes based on a thorough assessment of the different airport stakeholders and their interests. The output of the project showed which step change innovation was proposed in order to prepare the different types of airports for the second half of this century.
Funding
Results
The major achievements of this project have been the:
- Delivery of an extensive set of recommendations for different stakeholder groups:
- Airport managers, air navigation service providers, industry, airlines, passengers, greenfield airport developers
- The research community including the European Commission
- Integration of different methodologies and tools to support the generation of innovative airport concepts in a spiral life cycle process
- Integration of conclusions of all R&D activities performed within the project
The project succeeded in delivering its overall objectives and has:
- Managed to define aCDMappropriate for developing high-level and far-future airport concepts. This methodology may also be used to define future operational concepts for other modes of transport.
- This CDM can also be used to identify improvement areas and needs in the airport of the future at a V0 maturity level. The project provided an adequate scope for the three concepts of operations (TE, UG and CE) for identifying and classifying quantitatively the technical and operational solutions that can solve identified bottlenecks.
- Validation procedures have been successfully custom-designed for this R&D project
- Developed solutions and ideas which fulfil the objectives set out by the three airport concepts were able to satisfy the expectations, requirements and objectives of future airports in the areas of sustainability, costs and mobility for the year 2050 and beyond, and considering that every airport has the option to focus on one or more of these objectives using the value function to fulfil its future needs.
- Identified the major R&D needs that will be required by such concepts in terms of modifications to the operation, management and infrastructure needs for the future airport.