The airline carriers have failed to raise their level of service to meet on-
and off- board service quality demands by the passengers in recent years. In fact,
the level of service has been lowered
by the airline carriers in the past decade. Unexpected and unannounced delays and
cancellations of flights have emerged
as a quasi-normal phenomenon in recent months and years. The airline unreliability
is becoming unbearable day by day;
however, the volume of airline passengers on domestic routes in the United States
has risen in recent years despite the
lowering of level of service and the devastating terrorist acts of September 11, 2001.
Some speculate that this
increased ridership has caused extra pressure on available infrastructure such as
airports. However, the causes of
increases in air passenger volume despite the presence of frictional factors such
as low level of service have not been
thoroughly investigated by academicians recently. The nature of current air passenger
travel behavior is also largely
unexplored. I propose to study the travel behavior of airline passengers and investigate
the contributing factors
leading to increases in the volume of airline passengers on U.S. domestic routes.
I intend to investigate whether the
travel demand by the airline passengers has crossed the threshold infrastructure utilization
level. I also propose to
investigate whether low level of service has caused air passengers divert to ground
transportation. If so, I intend to
analyze its impacts on ground transport infrastructure utilization and costs. Initially,
I plan to investigate these
factors analyzing the in- and out-bound domestic flights in the airports of this region:
Chicago’s O’Hare
International Airport (ORD), Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County International Airport
(DTW), Cincinnati-Covington
International Airport (CVG), Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE), and Toledo
Express Airport (TOL). If I
encounter any unforeseen trouble with data on any of the said airports while working
on the project, I’ll select
other appropriate airports and work on those. In this regard, I’ll greatly appreciate
the advice from UT-UTC on
selecting most appropriate airports for this study. If funding continues for the second
stage, I’ll increase the
scope of my study and investigate the travel behavior of airline passengers and infrastructure
utilization at the
national level. I’ll conduct a longitudinal study of the last decade using the dataset
provided by the Bureau of
Transportation Statistics.