Latest issue – Issue 52

variances airline ticket pricesVariances in Airline Ticket Prices
By Daan Nederlof

This paper aims to illustrate the effect of market concentration and competitive forces on the airline ticket price variance. In addition it provides insight in the main drivers causing ticket prices to disperse. Potential groups of interest for this paper include aviation professionals,students and airline passengers, will gain a thorough understanding of the fundamentals in ticket price variances.

Slot Trading: The New Proposal Of The European Commission
By Guilia Mauri

On 1st December 2011, the European Commission adopted a comprehensive package of measures whose declared aim is, among others, to address capacity shortage at European airports. The so called “better airports” package covers three main areas: slots, groundhandling, and noise.

This article focuses on the proposed recognition of a secondary market for slots and presents the evolution of the Commission’s position on this topic since the adoption of Regulation No. 95/93 on common rules for the allocation of slots.

If the overall proposal of the Commission on slots has been partially criticized by the associations of airlines, the recognition of a secondary market for slots has been welcomed by the entire industry as a definite step forward that would favor decongestion of heavily congested European airports.

airline mergersThe European Commission Appraisal of Airline Mergers
by Michele Giannino

The purpose of this article is to discuss the Commission policy on slot remedies. In particular, it focuses on the questions whether slot remedies are effective tools to resolve the competition problems arising out of airline mergers and which elements should be included in slot remedy packages in order to enhance their effectiveness. These are questions of practical relevance given the cautious approach of the Commission in clearing mergers on the basis of efficiency defence. Thus, offering a set of suitable remedies to restore competition may be the only way for the merging parties to obtain the go-ahead from the Commission for a problematic merger.

planningAssessing the Efficacy of Dynamic Adaptive Planning of Infrastructure: Results From Computational Experiments
By Jan Kwakkel

Airport Strategic Planning focuses on the development of plans for the medium–term and long-term development of an airport. Strategic planning can be done in many different ways. For airports, the dominant approach is Airport Master Planning, which results in a static plan that fails if the future turns out to deviate from the future anticipated during the development of the plan. To better cope with uncertainty, flexibility and adaptivity in the plans is necessary. However, how efficacious are such adaptive plans as compared to the more traditional static rigid plans? Using computational techniques, we find that only in a very narrow range of plausible futures a rigid plan performs better than the adaptive plan.

klm-cargoAirports Developing Air Services for Cargo versus Passenger Airlines
Floris de Haan

Over the years Air Service Development has developed into a valuable tool for airports tokeep their fate into their own hands. By actively providing air service analyses to airlines,airports are able to expand their client and route portfolio. Besides actively targeting passenger airlines also cargo airlines are being targeted by airports. At the yearly held WorldRoute Development Forum airlines are approached by airports in attempts to convinceairlines of flying to their respective airports. This paper provides an overview of the differencesin approaching cargo airlines versus passenger airlines. Besides, for sure, cargoplays a contributing role in the revenue generation of passenger airlines, once a passengerairline has decided to start operating a route. The majority of the information provided is from experience of the author, having done passenger and cargo air service developmentfor airports, amongst others: Amsterdam, New Delhi and Cologne Bonn.

price‘Impact of Price Regulation on Airport Charges’
By Ahmed Fadlaoui

As part of the master program Transport and Supply Chain Management (TSCM) at VU University in Amsterdam I did a thesis research concerning the impact of price regulation on airport charges. The research was aimed to provide an answer to the literature discussion whether airports have the incentive to charge excessive tariffs and if they do so whether price regulation is the right method to avoid this incentive. Results and insights gained from the thesis research will be treated in this article.

ticket-taxColumn: One year later : The German Ticket Tax
By Hugo Gordijn

Germany has introduced in January 2011 an aviation tax (luftverkehrsabgabe). The effects of the tax are as expected : small and medium sized airports which are dependent on low cost carriers have suffered a loss of passengers. The larger airports have grown. For the country as a whole the growth in passenger numbers is 5%. This is comparable with other large European aviation nations. So, what’s the problem ? And what can be expected from the EU-ETS ?

ethical_issuesEthical Issues in Aviation
Book Review by John Stoop

The book is dedicated to the first 7 students who have completed the Aviation Ethics course at Lewis University. This emphasizes the need to explicitly incorporate ethics in education and training. As such, the book is a novelty in its kind and provides a unique opportunity for aviation students, scientists and practitioners to get explicitly acquainted with ethics in aviation beyond the level of codes of conduct, normative behavior and anecdotic, operational dilemmas.

networks-in-aviationNetworks in Aviation – Strategies and Structures
Book Review by Abdullah Nergiz

With this book one can discover the main aspects of an airline’s network structure. It is written clearly, which allows also people without profound knowledge about network management to understand the topics adequately. The book is, however, also interesting for managers in the industry: the preface written by Dr. Christoph Franz (CEO of Lufthansa) welcomes readers. Since Lufthansa Group serves more than 270 destinations under various brand names such as Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, bmi, Brussels Airlines, and Germanwings, Dr.Franz’s foreword is symbolically important.


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