Less than 1 percent of all freight tonnage is carried by air. Nonetheless, this statistic significantly underestimates the importance of air freight because, in value of cargo moved, air transport dominates all other modes. For example, although Heathrow Airport handles only about a million tons of freight per year, in value of throughput it ranks as Britain’s premier port.

As is the case with passenger facilities, freight terminals vary greatly in the volumes of material handled. Consequently, the scale of the building facilities and the nature of the handling methods also vary. Because only 10 percent of air cargo is carried loose or in bulk, all modern air-cargo facilities are designed to handle containers. In countries where labour is cheap and where freight throughputs at the terminal are not high, freight-handling systems can still be economically designed around the manhandling concept. This is not feasible in developed countries, where labour costs are high. Even at facilities with small throughputs, freight is moved by mobile mechanical equipment such as stackers, tugs, and forklift trucks. At high-volume facilities, a mixture of mobile equipment and complex fixed stacking and movement systems must be used. The fixed systems, which require complex engineering design and maintenance, are known as transfer vehicles (TVs) and elevating transfer vehicles (ETVs).

In the design of air-cargo facilities, special attention must be given to the handling of very heavy and oversized freight, perishables, urgent materials such as serums and human donor organs, high-value goods such as diamonds and gold, hazardous goods, and livestock.

An area of very fast growth in the air-cargo business is specialized movement by integrated carriers such as the U.S.-based FedEx Corporation, which offer door-to-door delivery of small packages at premium rates. In its early years, this type of freight grew by more than 17 percent per annum. Cargo terminals for the small-package business are designed and constructed separately from conventional air-cargo terminals. They operate in a different manner, with all packages being cleared on an overnight basis.

Links to local ground transportation

An airport should always be considered an interchange where different modes of transportation connect. Since the airport itself is not a primary destination, consideration must be given to access by surface vehicles. This is as critical a factor in airport layout and design as it is in the process of site selection. A large airport can quite easily generate in excess of 100,000 daily access trips by passengers and the same number of trips by workers, visitors, and suppliers. Such a scale of surface movement requires careful consideration of the design of internal circulation roads and access highways to the city centre and to the economic hinterland served by the airport. Additionally, road-based access requires the careful design of drop-down and pick-up areas and of both long-term and short-term parking. Larger airports are able to sustain economically viable links to taxi, limousine, and bus services. In addition, many of the world’s largest airports are linked to intercity, suburban, and metro-style rail systems.

Peak traffic on airport approach roads tends to occur in the morning and evening, coinciding with other peaks of suburban traffic, so that it is difficult to forecast journey times between an airport and the downtown areas during rush periods. Even so, as major airports have gradually moved farther away from city centres, journey times to airports have increased. Road-traffic congestion has accentuated the problem, and the cost of delay has become critical in the economic comparison of air and surface transportation. In fact, large airports located on sites remote from the cities they serve have proved to be very unpopular with both passengers and airlines (e.g., Narita at Tokyo and, for many years, Mirabel at Montreal and Dulles at Washington, D.C.).

A major argument for short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft lies in their lesser requirements for airport space, promising sites close to the central city. However, STOL airports have not proved economically viable, mainly because the aircraft used have been small, expensive to operate, and (at least in popular perception) uncomfortable. Furthermore, STOL aircraft have relatively low cruising speeds, which have limited their useful range. Helicopters, also known as vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, are in general too expensive for civil aviation transport, but the introduction of large tilt-rotor aircraft might revolutionize the use of centre-city airports.

Airport capacity

The various facilities at an airport are designed to cope adequately with the anticipated flow of passengers and cargo. The flow that any particular facility can accommodate without serious inconvenience to the users is considered to be its capacity. Limits on the traffic that can reasonably be accommodated at an airport are reached in a number of ways. These include air traffic delays to landing and takeoff movements; congestion on runways, taxiways, and aprons; crowding and delays in terminal buildings; or severe congestion in such access facilities as parking areas, internal roads, and public transport.

At smaller one-runway airports, limits to capacity usually occur in the terminal areas, since the operational capacity of a single runway with adequate taxiways is quite large. When passenger volumes reach approximately 25 million per year, a single runway is unlikely to be adequate to handle the number of aircraft movements that take place during peak periods. At this point at least one additional runway, permitting simultaneous operation, is required. Airports with two simultaneous runways should be able to handle approximately 55 to 65 million passengers per year, and here, too, the main capacity problems are related to the provision of adequate terminal space. Layouts with four parallel runways are estimated to have operational capacities of well over one million aircraft movements per year and annual passenger movements in excess of 100 million. The main capacity constraints of such facilities are in the provision of sufficient airspace for controlled aircraft movements and in the provision of adequate access facilities. It is likely that many of the world’s largest airports will face access problems before they reach the operational capacity of their runways.

Drainage

Large airports are actually urban complexes in which high-population activity centres are closely associated with very extensive paved areas. Typically a large airport can, on a daily basis, handle more than 100,000 passengers and support a working population of more than 50,000 employees. The sewage system of such an airport must cope with large daily flows of sanitary sewage effluent and, in addition, must accommodate runoff from rain and snow accumulating over several hundred acres of impervious pavement. The scale of the sewage problem at many large airports is such that some facilities have their own sewage treatment plants, especially for sanitary sewage. Because many airports are situated on low-lying ground, which is more likely to provide the flat land necessary for airstrips, the sewage system must often include extensive pumping facilities.

Growing concern about the environment combined with the increasing scale of activity at many airports has meant that runoff water can no longer be drained directly into bodies of surface water such as rivers and lakes. In particular, deicing chemicals used on aircraft and airfield pavements and cleaning chemicals used in aircraft maintenance are serious contaminants of groundwater and surface water. Consequently, some airports are required to provide at least primary treatment of all runoff discharges, and there are legal restrictions on the nature of the chemicals that can be used. In order to prevent groundwater pollution, Munich Airport was designed to accommodate existing flows of surface water across the entire site and was also provided with extensive arrangements for the recycling of deicing chemicals.