Page 32 - Planning and Design of Airports

The Natur e of Civil Aviation and Airports 13

Percentage
Number of of 2006 Total Percentage of All
Airports Airport Type Enplanements Based Aircraft
30 Large hub primary 68.7 0.9
37 Medium hub primary 20.0 2.6
72 Small hub primary 8.1 4.3
244 Nonhub primary 3.0 10.9
139 Nonprimary 0.1 2.4
commercial service
270 Relievers 0.0 28.2
2,564 General aviation 0.0 40.8
3,356 Existing NPIAS 99.9 89.8
airports
16,459 Low-activity landing 0.1 10.2
areas (Non-NPIAS)

TABLE 1-5 Number of NPIAS Airports by Hub Classification

are located within an SMSA of population of at least 5,000,000 or
where passenger enplanements exceed 250,000 annually. In addition,
the airport must have at least 100 aircraft based at the field or handle
at least 25,000 itinerant operations annually. Reliever airports,
although not serving regular commercial service operations, are
among the busiest airports in the United States.
While most of the airports in the United States are privately
owned and operated, the majority of public use airports are in fact
publicly owned. Public use airports, and commercial service airports
in particular, are typically owned and operated by local municipali-
ties, counties, states, or some public “authority” typically overseen
by representatives from a combination of local and regional jurisdic-
tions. There are a few public use airports that are operated by private
airport management companies but rarely do private firms actually
own the property on which the airport is located. As such, in the
United States, most planning and design programs at civil public use
airports must go through extensive governmental processes for ulti-
mate approval and often funding support.
While the United States has by far the greatest number of com-
mercial service and general aviation airports in the world, many of
the world’s largest and most important airports are located all over
the globe. Table 1-6 lists the world’s busiest airports.