ACRP IdeaHub Research Projects

Airports are increasingly interested in bringing multi-discipline subject matter experts together in a common environment to improve collaborative decision making during regular and irregular operations. Guidance on how to plan and design for these centers is needed.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, airports have created many facilities/amenities inside and outside of the airport terminals in both physical infrastructure and soft technology fields to better cater passengers' demands and needs, with an intend to create more customer-friendly passenger travel experience. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the public travel behaviors and impacted the corporate/business travel policies in 2020,... more »

Airports parking garages use automated license plate scanning in support or in lieu of paper tickets to establish fee payments. This technology might also be used to identify vehicles that might cause a threat and vehicles that might have civil or criminal enforcement issues.

The airport vehicle monitoring system and parking garages could be linked to local and national law enforcement centers to validate vehicle licenses... more »

Using FEMA emergency management core capabilities and CDC's public health preparedness capabilities as models, this ACRP proposed project will help airports across the country expand existing emergency management programs through the development of industry specific capabilities and metrics for increasing resiliency, preparedness, recovery, planning, and more.

Recent research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology (https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13971) suggests that existing infrastructure and weather radar data can be used to help airports anticipate and respond to periods of increased wildlife strike hazards.

More than 17,000 wildlife strikes were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2019. Globally, wildlife strikes have killed more than 287 people... more »

Aviation accident data has limitations for establishing airport safety zones used to guide airport-vicinity land use decisions. Establishing uniform reporting criteria across responsible agencies will assist local jurisdictions to define safety zones and apply them to maintain airport viability.

Community acceptance of the rapidly emerging Urban Air Mobility (UAM) market will be strongly driven by public noise concerns; however, no regulatory tool exists to evaluate potential environmental noise impacts. Whereas conventional helicopters have one or two rotors, UAM vehicles may have large numbers of rotors for different functions that operate at variable speeds. These differences necessitate the development of... more »

Accurate predictions of the noise environment in communities surrounding airports and spaceports from launch and reentry vehicle operations require models that have been validated over a range of vehicle types, operations, and atmospheric conditions. Research is needed to validate the commercial space operations noise models developed under ACRP 02-66 using the community noise measurement database collected under ACRP... more »