Title: A sustainable aviation sector index to benchmark the landside and airside based on airport-airline pairs

Authors: Şan Kılkış; Şiir Kılkış

Addresses: TU Delft Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 1, 2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands ' The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, Atatürk Bulvarı No: 221 Kavaklıdere, 06100 Ankara, Turkey

Abstract: This paper develops and applies a sustainable aviation sector index to benchmark the performance of airport and airline pairs. The index is composed of two subindices that address the landside and airside of the aviation sector. These indices involve 5 dimensions and 25 indicators on the landside and 4 dimensions and 20 indicators on the airside, respectively. The sum of the products of the normalised values of the related dimensions on the landside and airside are then used to obtain single composite indicator values for each airport and airline pair. The airport and airline pairs to which these subindices are applied represent the main airport hubs of major international airlines. In total, 20 airport and airline pairs are subjugated to the analyses that contain 15 different airports and 13 different airlines. The results indicate the pairs that have above average performances in multiple aspects of aviation services and quality, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and sustainable aviation measures in a comprehensive manner. According to the results, the airport and airline pairs that are in the top 5 are those that are marked as P₁, P₅, P₁₉, P₁₄ and P₁₆ in the sample. These leading pairs attain values between 8.8 and 7.2 in the integrated index whereas the average value for all pairs is 5.6. The research work contributes to the literature by providing an integrated approach to benchmark the landside and airside of the aviation sector. Such an integrated approach is useful for allowing airport and airline managers in partnering across the landside and airside to excel toward a more sustainable aviation sector to challenge the future.

Keywords: airlines; airports; airside; aviation; composite indicator; landside; ranking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSA.2017.086850

International Journal of Sustainable Aviation, 2017 Vol.3 No.3, pp.171 - 199

Received: 12 Apr 2017
Accepted: 21 Jun 2017
Published online: 29 Sep 2017 *

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