Air Transportation Planning 1

Today's session gave us a brief outlook about what the subject that we are going to take this time looks like. Air Transport Planning,

sounds like quite a subject. I personally am eager to get on with this and delve deeper into the whole subject.

Air Transport planning, or rather, urban transport planning encompasses 7 major aspects. Firstly it is understanding and also apply the planning process involved. Then it is concerned

with data management involving all the data required. Next is making surveys to obtain the necessary information needed for the planning process and to make

a forecast about the next outcome of things. The fifth is modelling or what we would call calibration before observing cash flow and evaluating the whole procedures

and getting feedback.

The most basic question for the subject would be, what is airp transportation planning? It is a process to meet the air transport objectives and to ensure that the planning made by the designated individuals are communicated to the decision makers in an understandable mode to see to it that the chance of making the right decisions would increase.

What then are the objectives of air transport planning? It is for:

1)Safety

2)Security

3)Cost

4)Time

5)Comfort

7)Environment

These are the things that it is trying to achieve, and to achieve this one would need basically four things:

1) Resources

This involves the infrastructure, human capital, financial and also the systems

2) Decision-makers

In Malaysia, it is the government (fed, state and local), the air transport operators (organizations such as MAS, Air Asia,

and MAHB), and the relevant authorities, for instance the DCA.

3) Planners

4) Air Transport System

For instance the organizations, technology and spatial configuration

There are many variations of planning directed to different type of problems. Terms such as micro, meso or macro are used to describe the level of detail or the size of an area under the scope of analysis. Expressions like corridor, areawide or metropolitian is used to describe the variations of the scope. The approach used for forecasting travel would differ according to the level of analysis, and even for a particular analysis the techniques used would have to be calibrated to suit the limitations in term of manpower and data availability.

Characteristics of Travel

Temporal and spatial Variations

Two very significant concepts of knowledge are time and space. Temporal expressions describe mainly the order and duration for something while space describes distance, direction, shape, size or topology. The most important aspect of space is however, topology, orientation and distance (Renz, 2002). Also, as shown in psychological studies, this is also the order in which children acquire spatial notions (Piaget and Inhalder, 1948).

In coming up with a detailed planning and proper management, it is not sufficient to just simply rely on the total magnitude of travel demand alone. The appearance of peak periods in certain time would require more number in transportation supply than at other times. However, because the cost of obtaining the supplies are great, then it is not easy to adjust it and large investments have to be made. Existance of directional differences in travel distributions would also cause inefficiency.

These are some very common spatial distribution patterns of trips in urban areas (Chatterjee and Venigalla, 2004):

1) Travel along dense corridors, which are usually radial connecting suburbs to central business district

2) Diffused travel pattern caused by urban sprawl

3) Suburb to suburm or circumferential travel

4) Travel within large activity centres in CBD and suburbs

Different travel modes would be needed in meeting these different types of patterns.