Relief airport

Palm Beach County Park Lantana Airport

A relief airport is an airport that is built or designated to provide relief or additional capacity to an area when the primary commercial airport(s) reach capacity. In some cases a relief airport is an existing one that is designated to handle a specific class of aircraft such as general aviation.

The advantages of an additional airport are clear. Less obvious are the capacity gains from moving general aviation from a commercial airport to a different facility. By removing aircraft with lower capacities and slower speeds, an airport is able to operate more flights with larger aircraft and handle more passengers increasing efficiency with minimal additional cost in facilities at the older and generally larger facility.

This also spreads out the aircraft over a wider area generally improving air traffic in the entire community.

To qualify for this designation, an airport must have 100 or more based aircraft or 25,000 annual itinerant operations[1]

See also

Sources

  1. National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS): 2009–2013 (PDF), Federal Aviation Administration, p. 8, retrieved 2017-03-31
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.