Maertens, S. (2007) New Developments in the Longhaul Air Travel Market - A Discussion of the Market Potential of Secondary Airports, Paper prepared for The 2007 World Confernece of Air Transport Research Society in UC-Berkeley, California, 21-24 June, 2007

A Discussion of the Market Potential of Secondary AirportsÂ

Although, in Europe, most longhaul air traffic is concentrated at a few hubs, some secondary airports such as Manchester or Dusseldorf have been successful in attracting a number of longhaul services. In this paper, we first give an overview on longhaul flight supply apart from the hubs and classify the observed flights into different groups. In a second step, factors that might influence airport choice by longhaul carriers - derived from the literature on airline network economies - are discussed and empirically tested using the multiple regression analysis for a sample of about 80 European airports. It is shown that the size and GDP of a secondary airport's catchment area have a significant influence on the supply of longhaul flights, i.e. on the number of seats offered on direct intercontinental flight services from secondary airports. The results might be of relevance for airport planning and management and help to avoid useless investment in longhaul infrastructure at airports with low demand. This kind of mis-allocation is especially relevant for countries such as Germany, where infrastructure dedicated for longhaul flights is provided at airports like Leipzig, where only few longhaul services arrive every week, while runway extension at Dusseldorf is not undertaken, despite sufficient demand.