|
To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 9.0.124 or greater is installed. Business aviation also follows a network, but it is a very strange net-work. The business aviation network has three times as many links as the scheduled services, nearly 100,000 in 2005. However, as Figure 11 shows, most of the airport pairs (note the logarithmic scale) served by business aviation are flown less than once per week. For scheduled traffic, the number of flights from airport A to airport B matches the number of flights back again. Figure 12 (right-hand side) shows that nearly all of the traffic has a similar number of flights from A to B as B to A. The rare exceptions are the occasional circular route, technical stops, and flights filed as ‘scheduled’ which were not. For business aviation, perhaps surprisingly, there is also a significant portion of the traffic between airport pairs which see the same num-ber of flights in both directions. These might be frequent links used by company shuttle services for example, or cases of non-business avia-tion use of an aircraft type from our business aircraft list. But the majority of business aviation flights are on airport pairs served seven to nine times in one direction for every ten in the other. One of the causes of this could be air taxi or fractional positioning flights. A rate of four positioning flights in every ten flights would not be unusual, and worse than one to one can happen (e.g. in the least efficient case, a flight from A to pick up passengers in B to take them to C, to return to the home base at A). On the extreme left of Figure 12 the largest number of airport pairs and still a significant portion of the business aviation traffic – are the routes served mostly in one direction. 18 Figure 11. Business aviation rarely flies the same route twice. Nearly all business airport pairs are flown less than once a week. For scheduled traffic there are as many airport pairs flown ten times/week as once/week.
|
