A Five-Year Projection of North Atlantic Oceanic Flight Activity

摘要

The International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) North Atlantic (NAT) traffic forecast has historically been an unconstrained second or third order result based on economic models that primarily forecast passenger demand. Because many of the busiest international airports are slot constrained, unbounded forecasts often present unrealistic growth expectations. In addition, these forecasts did not provide explicit forecasts for the seven Flight Information Regions (FIR) in the North Atlantic: Gander, Shanwick, New York Oceanic, Santa Maria, Reykjavik, Bodo, and Sondrestrom. To address these identified issues with NAT traffic forecasting, a new forecast methodology was developed based on the premise that the number of transoceanic flights for the next several years is fundamentally determined by the international air carriers and is reflected in their transoceanic fleet plans as well as in their public announcements. This new forecast methodology uses the publically available information in combination with historical flight data to generate a five-year forecast of NAT air traffic activity. Current projections indicate that scheduled traffic across the NAT region will increase annually by 5.3% between 2016 and 2021.