published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning

It has been universally recognized since the end of World War I that every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. Therefore, it may grant or refuse to aircraft of other states the right to fly into its airspace. [...]

This thesis deals with the plan of the Dutch government to build an offshore airport outside its territorial waters. Because the airport will be outside territorial waters several problems may arise. Under the Law of the Sea the question is whether such an airport can lawfully be built and what the different conditions are under which it is possible. The Convention on International Civil Aviation is older then the new Law of the Sea Convention and therefore not up to date with the new zones in the sea that have emerged. Air law therefore needs to be interpreted in the light of those new developments. / The first chapter deals with the reasons behind the plan to build such an airport. Thereafter, subsequent chapters discuss the law of the sea, air law, European law and the law of other organizations, which will have an influence on an offshore airport outside the territorial sea. The final chapter deals with plans and examples of other uses of artificial islands, including offshore airports.

Low-cost carriers and escalading fuel costs are placing increased pressure on US legacy carriers to reposition traditional revenue management techniques towards more customer-centric approaches. In this context, recent critiques of revenue management models question the validity of assumptions used to describe passenger cancellation and no-show behavior. Since forecasts of cancellation and no-shows are used to determine overbooking levels, i.e, authorization levels in excess of capacity, concerns related to possible missed revenue opportunities are justifiable. The goal of this research is to explore the impact of time-to-event forecasts of cancellations on airlines' revenue streams. To determine the intensity of the cancellation process, a discrete time proportional odds (DTPO) model with a prospective time scale was estimated for a sample of tickets provided by the Airline Reporting Corporation. Empirical results based on 2004 data from eight domestic US markets indicate that the intensity of the cancellation process is strongly influenced both by the time from ticket purchase and the time before flight departure, as well as several other covariates, including departure day of week, market, and group size. In order to assess potential revenue benefits associated with the DTPO formulation, a modified simulation experiment of a "single-resource capacity control" was designed. Simulation results indicate that time-to-event cancellation forecasts can generate revenue gains up to 2%. Overall, this research provides new insights into the transitional properties associated with the cancellation process, which will help airlines to improve their overbooking strategies.

The overarching research objective is to address the tightly-coupled interactions between the demand-side and supply-side components of the United States Commercial Air Transportation System (CATS) in a time-variant environment. A system-of-system perspective is adopted, where the scope is extended beyond the National Airspace System (NAS) level to the National Transportation System (NTS) level to capture the intermodal and multimodal relationships between NTS stakeholders. The Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation technique is employed where the NTS/NAS is treated as an integrated Multi-Agent System comprising of consumer and service provider agents representing the demand-side and supply-side components respectively. Successful calibration and validation of both model components against the observable real world data provided a CATS simulation tool where the aviation demand is estimated from socioeconomic and demographic properties of the population instead of merely based on enplanement growth multipliers. This valuable achievement enabled a 20-year outlook simulation study to investigate the implications of a global fuel price hike on the airline industry and the U.S. CATS at large. Simulation outcomes revealed insights into the airline competitive behaviors and the subsequent responses from transportation consumers.

The air transportation demand at large hubs in the U.S. is anticipated to double in the near future. Current runway construction plans at selected airports can relieve some capacity and delay problems, but many are doubtful that this solution is sufficient to accommodate the anticipated demand growth in the National Airspace System (NAS). With the worsening congestion problem, it is imperative to seek alternative solutions other than costly runway constructions. In this respect, many researchers and organizations have been building models and performing analyses of the NAS. However, the complexity and size of the problem results in an overwhelming task for transportation system modelers. This research seeks to compose an active design algorithm for an evolutionary airline network model so as to include network specific control properties. An airline network designer, referred to as a network architect, can use this tool to assess the possibilities of gaining more capacity by changing the network configuration. Since the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the airline service network has evolved from a point-to-point into a distinct hub-and-spoke network. Enplanement demand on the H&S network is the sum of Origin-Destination (O-D) demand and transfer demand. Even though the flight or enplanement demand is a function of O-D demand and passenger routings on the airline network, the distinction between enplanement and O-D demand is not often made. Instead, many demand forecast practices in current days are based on scale-ups from the enplanements, which include the demand to and from transferring network hubs. Based on this research, it was found that the current demand prediction practice can be improved by dissecting enplanements further into smaller pieces of information. As a result, enplanement demand is decomposed into intrinsic and variable parts. The proposed intrinsic demand model is based on the concept of 'true' origin-destination demand which includes the direction of each round trip travel. The result from using true O-D concept reveals the socioeconomic functional roles of airports on the network. Linear trends are observed for both the produced and attracted demand from the data. Therefore, this approach is expected to provide more accurate prediction capability. With the intrinsic demand model in place, the variable part of the demand is modeled on an air transportation network model, which is built with accelerated evolution scheme. The accelerated evolution scheme was introduced to view the air transportation network as an evolutionary one instead of a parametric one. The network model takes in intrinsic demand data before undergoing an evolution path to generate a target network. The results from the network model suggests that air transportation networks can be modeled using evolutionary structure and it was possible to generate the emulated NAS. A dehubbing scenario study of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport demonstrated the prediction capability of the proposed network model. The overall process from intrinsic demand modeling and evolutionary network modeling is a unique and it is highly beneficial for simulating active control of the transportation networks.

Thesis (M. of Strategic Studies)--U.S. Army War College, 2006. / Cover title. "15 MAR 2006"--Tech. report doc. page. Includes bibliographical references (p. 14-17). Full text document also available on public STINET.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Magister Technologiae: Business Administration in the Faculty of Business at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2012 / The purpose of this research study was to investigate the effect that different leadership styles have on employee job satisfaction and organisational commitment within a high-tech South African organisation. The sample of this study consisted of 126 full time and part-time employees working in all functional levels in Company-x. The sample included both male and female respondents. Data was gathered by using a structured survey questionnaire which was delivered on site at Company-x. The questionnaire included a demographic/biographic section and three instruments namely the Mohrman-Cook-Mohrman Job Satisfaction Scales (MCMJSS), the Leaders Behaviour Descriptive Questionnaire (LBDQ) and the Organisational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ). Of the 126 questionnaires that were returned only two were not completed. The results indicate that respondents perceive their leaders’ leadership style as being equal for initiating structure and consideration-oriented leadership styles. The results also indicated that respondents have a higher level of extrinsic job satisfaction than intrinsic job satisfaction and that the level of affective organisational commitment is above average. The findings show that only consideration-oriented leadership play a role in predicting 17.1 per cent of intrinsic job satisfaction and that initiating structure leadership has no significant effect in predicting intrinsic job satisfaction. The results showed that initiating structure and consideration-oriented leadership styles contribute to 36 per cent of the total variance that occurs within extrinsic job satisfaction. The findings also reveal that certain ratio and discrete demographic/biographic variables have no effect on job satisfaction and organisational commitment. A number of conclusions and recommendations were drawn from this study which was based on the obtained results. The recommendations were aimed at improving the levels of intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction as well as the level of affective organisational commitment.

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