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by stuart8ol 948 days ago
We would love to do the analysis you are describing in detail. I'm thinking getting people movement data from google maps or something, using that to figure out where people are traveling to. Then use that to determine what traffic needs to go through the major airports and who would be better off going to local airports and really map the traffic in detail. Then overlay our cost data to see what is the real optimum. If anyone can help with that we would love to chat!
1 comments
notahacker 947 days ago
Using road traffic data to figure out final destinations of passengers is an interesting idea (I'm not sure you'd get much more granularity than "x% of [increased] road traffic associated with London Luton airport actually heads north of Luton away from London" though). I'm wondering if any airports have used traffic data to derive stats for their pitches to airlines; they certainly collate other facts and figures and do other analysis to try to convince airlines to serve them as well as neighbouring airports

Systematic data on "last mile" passenger origin and destination for a large number of airports sounds like a holy grail product for network development that would be a viable business in its own right, the problem being that none of the systematic sources of that information I can think of are likely to share it. Survey data like this may be as good as it gets https://www.caa.co.uk/data-and-analysis/uk-aviation-market/c...

At a macro level passenger demand is closely correlated with GDP and population growth (and the fleet forecast and aircraft valuation models most of the industry uses are based on pretty simple macro assumptions). So with city-level population/GDP figures combined with easily-obtained existing airline network/capacity data you can start identifying areas that are badly connected, perhaps ending up with some sort of gravity model.

Would love to chat about this sort of thing in more detail (I used to work at Flightglobal/Cirium and worked more recently on airline app startup projects, and my email is dtellett@gmail.com)

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