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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 »

TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Legal Research Digest 34: Airport Public Health Preparedness and Response: Legal Rights, Powers, and Duties addressed the legal issues concerning the measures to detect communicable diseases, regulations to control communicable diseases, methods for decontamination, emergency legal preparedness, privacy, and potential sources of liability.

This LRD was released in August... more »

The purpose of this digest would be to explore the legal issues of operating spacecraft under 14 CFR Parts 400 to 460 at Part 139 and non-certified aviation facilities.

Develop model airfield lighting maintenance training tools (e.g. videos, guides) for small airports where such maintenance is performed by multi-tasked staff who are not electricians. Develop a model airfield lighting maintenance program for small airports including guidance for contracting out airfield lighting repairs when needed.

Among the case study airports in ACRP-1-42, how did the governance model affect how the airport responded. What recovery goals were achieve. How did measures of performance change if at all. How did G/A airports fare in the recovery compared to commercial service airports.

ACRP Report 157 (Improving the Airport Customer Experience)(2017) found that airport arts programs play an important role in improving the customer experience at airports and that airports with such arts programs are among the most highly rated airports in the world. ACRP Synthesis 11-03/Topic S01-21 (The Benefits of Airport Arts Programs) surveyed and synthesized the the state of practice of airport rotating visual art... more »

ACRP Synthesis 11-03/Topic S01-21 (The Benefits of Airport Arts Programs) provides an exhaustive analysis of current practices related to airport arts programs; the Synthesis identifies many tools that airports use to govern such programs and to manage them efficiently and economically. It was, however, beyond the scope of Synthesis 11-03/Topic S01-21 to provide an in depth analysis of precisely how these tools are used... more »

Sustainability and environmental mitigation are rapidly being incorporated into construction efforts at airports to mitigate and offset environmental impacts such as air emissions, water quality issues, etc. Naturally, every airport and their associated construction efforts and ability to incorporate sustainability vary on multiple fronts. This effort would provide a synthesis of construction sustainability and environmental... more »

In recent years, there has been an a growing concern regarding emissions of aviation related ultrafine particles (UFPs). This effort would consolidate relevant research regarding aviation and UFP emissions in order to provide useful insight to airports, stakeholders, and the public.

The purpose of this project is to provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of the current status of adopting passenger loyalty programs by the primary hub airports of the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS).

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 »

The legal, policy, and regulatory environment may present challenges for certifying and authorizing some technologies due to novel features and combinations of features that could be found in novel aircraft designs. While this is not an exhaustive list, some of these could include distributed electric propulsion/tilt-wing propulsion, vertical take-off and land, autonomy hardware and software, optionally piloted configurations,... more »

The Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (ACDBE) program rules set for th in 49 CFR Part 23 prohibits airport sponsors from entering into long-term, exclusive (LTE) agreements for concessions, except under very limited conditions and only with pre-review and approval from the FAA Office of Civil Rights. The DOT published the final rule in the Federal Register on June 20, 2012, but according to one compliance... more »

Due to COVID-19, airport operators had to develop strategies for maintaining the activity with social distancing. Some of them include remote work and remote learning. However, not all the tasks can be performed from home (e.g., real-time operations management). The goal of this synthesis would be to list the tasks and missions that airports have experimented in remote work, to explore the training sessions that can be... more »

The synthesis would collect and present best practices developed by airports to protect the public and the airport workers (incl. tenants and stakeholders) from COVID-19. The domain of the study includes the landside (esp. how to ensure consistency between airport and mass transit, TNCs, etc.), the terminal area (incl. the restricted access areas), and the airside (ramp and airfield workers).