Determining the locations of airports and passenger demand by evaluating accessibility and special properties: Case study of Turkey

The accessibility of airports and the airport preference of users are significant criteria for the competitiveness of airports. When passengers choose a route, they actually expect the completion of the transportation chain and they want to travel to the door from the door. For this reason, the factors that affect the passenger's decision for a significant option go beyond the price and quality of air services. The decision for a specific air service and a particular airport depends on the accessibility of the airport to a considerable extent. Factors affecting the choice of the airport can simply be divided into two categories. The category that reflects the number of air fares, frequencies and served destinations is defined as "air side". The category of airport accessibility, namely access, is also called "land side". The locations of the airports are usually set up around the periphery of the city's with a reasonable length such as 50 km. The access of the airports may affect the passenger demands, so this study investigate the Turkish airport coverage in length of 50, 75 and 100 km radius from city centers. The main purpose of this study thus investigates whether a new airport construction is needed or not for domestic flights. Results showed that if 100 km radius length is used as a criterion for building new airport, only 10 cities with total population of about 2.5 million people will be outside the airport access. Socio-economical features are highly related with the location choice of airports. Therefore, accessibility properties are compared with the special properties of the cities and possible new airport locations have been determined.