TY - JFULL AU - Nicola Gualandi and Luca Mantecchini and Davide Serrau PY - 2008/12/ TI - Environmental Capacity and Sustainability of European Regional Airports: A Case Study T2 - International Journal of Physical and Mathematical Sciences SP - 872 EP - 878 VL - 2 SN - 1307-6892 UR - https://publications.waset.org/pdf/3112 PU - World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology NX - Open Science Index 23, 2008 N2 - Airport capacity has always been perceived in the traditional sense as the number of aircraft operations during a specified time corresponding to a tolerable level of average delay and it mostly depends on the airside characteristics, on the fleet mix variability and on the ATM. The adoption of the Directive 2002/30/EC in the EU countries drives the stakeholders to conceive airport capacity in a different way though. Airport capacity in this sense is fundamentally driven by environmental criteria, and since acoustical externalities represent the most important factors, those are the ones that could pose a serious threat to the growth of airports and to aviation market itself in the short-medium term. The importance of the regional airports in the deregulated market grew fast during the last decade since they represent spokes for network carriers and a preferential destination for low-fares carriers. Not only regional airports have witnessed a fast and unexpected growth in traffic but also a fast growth in the complaints for the nuisance by the people living near those airports. In this paper the results of a study conducted in cooperation with the airport of Bologna G. Marconi are presented in order to investigate airport acoustical capacity as a defacto constraint of airport growth. ER -