San Francisco Airport -- Solutions

San Francisco Airport -- Solutions

In business, it is sometimes necessary to make decisions regarding the long-term future in terms of survival. This often means that there are few choices, some or most of which might be unpleasant. Airports face many difficult decisions in both the long and short-term. In the short-term, challenges are to maintain a business that can sustain itself in spite of the recent economic downturn and the continuing struggle that former clients face to make ends meet. Fewer people therefore tend to use airports and flights for non-essential purposes such as vacations and the like. On the other hand, in the long-term, airports have the need to maintain adequate capacity to continue serving a projected growth in customer base. This is the case at San Francisco Airport. Although the company's current approach does address some of the long-term issues they face, this is not adequate to truly be able to face capacity growth concerns in the future. A more proactive step is necessary to handle this. It is therefore necessary for airport managers to focus not only upon current capacity and delay concerns, but also on potential long-term growth and concomitant capacity needs. Technologies such as NextGen offer some potential solutions for the situation at San Francisco Airport, while incorporating other airports in its operations may also be a viable alternative to actually expanding the space at the facility.

Eads, Kiefer, and Mehndiratte (n.d., p. 44) acknowledge that the greatest challenge the airport is currently facing in terms of delays is its local weather conditions. This causes more delays than any other factor at the airport. According to the authors, one long-term solution to this is the reconfiguration of its runway space, which would take a long time, but would ultimately provide a solution to most of the airport's delay challenges. While the majority of the paper focuses on short-term policies that could be used for the airport's current delay problems, the reader is left wondering if the true capacity needs for the future have been taken into account in the reconfiguration process. It appears that there has been a somewhat myopic assessment of current needs in terms of delays and capacity. However, the growth of the passenger base and long-term future capacity needs have not been so much ignored as blindly avoided in the light of the current need to avoid weather-related delays. After the reconfiguration of its runways, San Francisco Airport may therefore face capacity concerns related to the growth of its customer base, which would all but negate its efforts to mitigate the weather problem.

One major problem in the concern for capacity is that San Francisco Airport in fact lacks the space to increase its physical size. It would therefore be difficult to build additional runways. The space is simply not there. This is a factor that Butler (2008) takes into account. The author suggests that NextGen technologies can potentially offer solutions to the challenges faced by San Francisco Airport, where the problem is not so much excessively expensive real estate, as the fact that the real estate for expansion simply does not exist. In this, the author suggests that the technology can be used to increase airport runway capacity without in fact expanding the geographical boundaries of the airport itself. This appears to be an ideal long-term solution, not only for weather-related delays, but also for the potential growth of the customer base.

Butler (2008, p. 4) suggests that one way to increase runway capacity without in fact building more runways is the use of NextGen technologies in application to air traffic control. The shape that current air traffic control technologies take is that air traffic controllers guide aircraft from a tower from which they can be seen. The lack of visibility caused by bad weather, particularly at San Francisco Airport, makes this difficult. With NextGen technologies, however, this problem can be mitigated.

According to Butler (2008, p. 4), NextGen technologies enable two aircraft to be positioned for entering closely spaced parallel runways, even when there is bad weather and limited visibility. The technology would involve more than eyes or radar equipment that can perceive the aircraft only on a physical basis. Each craft would be equipped with technology pilots can use to sense the position of the parallel craft. Each craft would also have a prescribed path that is monitored by the technology. Any deviation from this would cause an automatic abandonment of the landing attempt. Since this type of landing procedure is not allowed today, the implementation of the technology could dramatically increase the capacity at San Francisco airport, while also creating a much better ration between the capacity on days when the weather is good and those when it is not.