Quote:
Originally Posted by SDCAL
^ I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison comparing SAN to LGW and BOM.
Those airports have a longer runway and can handle bigger aircraft. They also have more room to maneuver planes and aren't as constrained as SAN. They are also 24 hour operations and don't have the curfew issue SAN does.
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Runway length is not an issue. Maybe 20 years ago it was, but airlines can run 400+ pax flights out of SAN on several modern aircraft - 777s, 787s, 350s, etc, and even some older ones (767, 330, 340.) SAN can accommodate any aircraft except the A380, which honestly no airline would fly there even if they could.
24 operations: Gatwick has restrictions on operation from 23:00 until 6:00, much like SAN. According to Gatwick's website, they had 280,000 aircraft movements in 2016. Only 14,000 of those (5%) depart/arrive between 23:00 and 6:00. I can't find exact data, but my personal experience with Gatwick is that those night flights are often cargo. I just looked at overnight traffic for the last two days, and even during busy summer season, there were.... zero passenger departures during those hours. I can see only one landing from yesterday from Cuba at 5:15, which would be allowed at SAN as well. The fact is, if we assume half of all movements are landings (they better be
), then at
minimum, 97.5% of Gatwick's passengers fly during normal SAN operating hours.
SAN can grow to Gatwick levels of pax on a single runway, which represents 2-3 decades of projected use, simply by replacing 30 seat aircraft with 300 seat aircraft. And that will happen, when demand is there. And that's without considering other factors. High speed rail and autonomous ground transport will probably decrease airport utilization, and new air traffic control systems will increase the frequency of aircraft movements, increasing the number of aircraft that each runway can handle:
Quote:
Originally Posted by https://www.wired.com/2007/10/faa/
The FAA's Laura Brown says ADS-B will help reduce congestion in several ways. "Because it will provide such precise information about where planes are located, we think we'll be able to operate them closer to one another in some parts of the air space," she says. "Which means more capacity." Brown adds that the system will allow controllers to handle more aircraft, which means fewer handoffs from controller to controller. "Ultimately, the system is more effective if you are able to limit the amount of communication back and forth."
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Combining all of these factors, its easy to see why the billion dollars investment in SAN was made: the location will have adequate capacity well into the future.