Airside capacity of Brazilian airports [paper in Portuguese]

In order to satisfy the continually growing demand for air transportation, further improvements has been demanded to increase airports’ capacity. Usually, such effort requires significant resources, generating social and environmental concerns. When improving any airport facility, several systemic actions are required in order to ensure that such effort will actually be able to provide real benefits to the airport (as a whole), instead of just transferring the bottleneck through the system. In the present study, the operational capacities of two airside’s subsystems are presented, showing those metrics for the top twenty Brazilian airports. As a result, only four of them indicate good balance between subsystems capacities, therefore, all the others are showing at least one subsystem that can be characterized as a bottleneck. For those cases, the expansion of the airport capacity is only possible through actions capable to solve capacity problems at the limited subsystem.