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IATA is sounding alarm bells about the growth in the number of airports worldwide that have reached their capacity for arriving and departing flights.
This summer, 204 airports worldwide are designated as Level 3 slot-coordinated facilities, meaning that they don’t have either the runway, ramp or gate capacity to handle all of the flights that commercial airlines, cargo carriers and other air service providers would like to operate there.
That’s up from just 160 slot-coordinated airports in 2012 and 189 such airports in November, IATA said at its Annual General Meeting in Sydney this month. And with the organization projecting that the number of annual worldwide air travelers will double from the 2017 figure of 4.1 billion in the next 20 years, the problem will most likely get worse. In fact, IATA forecasts that as many as 100 additional airports could be declared full in the next 10 years.
“This is a significant problem for the industry: reducing flexibility, disabling the ability to meet passenger demand without serious constraints and nonoptimal flight schedules to fit in with available capacity,” Lara Maughan, IATA’s head of worldwide airport slots, wrote in a primer on the issue last December.
Source: travelweekly.com
