Measuring Demand for Access to Regional Airports: An Application of Zero-Inflated Poisson Regression

Abstract

The demand for access to regional airports is measured by the counts of area navigation (RNA V)/required navigation (RNP) procedures filed in the flight plan and collected by the Federal Aviation Administration's host computer system. In the present paper, the concept of access implies how easily and consistently equipped and authorized aircraft can utilize performance-based navigation at regional airports where there is no instrument landing systems (ILS). The demand for access to regional airports is likely to be strongly correlated to on-board surveillance equipment and to business jet type of aircraft whether privately or company-owned. The incidence of surveillance equipment is higher at airport such at Van Nuys (VNY) where the proportion of jets is the highest.