Airport Operations Analysis - Toronto's Airports

Toronto, four airports serving the main metropolitan area in Canada

Introduction

This report is about four airports serving the metropolitan city, Toronto, Canada. In the next part, the airport physical design and capacity of Billy Bishop Toronto CIty Airport will be examined deeply. The second part is to introduce the current situation of three other airports in Toronto in terms of airlines operating, destinations serving as well as accessibility of catchment area, and connectivity. This part will be wrapped up with strengths and weaknesses of Toronto operating four airports. The last part of this report will discuss the aviation position of Toronto in the globe, regional and Canada. Finally, this report will be concluded with strategic suggestions to both Toronto government and four airports how to improve efficiencies and sustain in the aviation industry.

Physical design, capacity of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (YTZ)

Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (IATA: YTZ, ICAO: CYTZ) is an offshore city airport with only 121-metre (400ft) gap from the downtown business and tourism districts in Toronto, located on an island at the south-west of Downtown Toronto. There is one main runway and two shorter runways, with a water aerodrome. Behind the biggest international airport, Toronto Pearson International, YTZ is a smaller airport serving the Toronto business area. It served 2.4 million passengers in 2014 making it as the ninth busiest airport in Canada.

As an offshore airport located on the Toronto Harbor, it is connected by ferries from downtown Toronto to the airport terminal. Also, there is an underwater pedestrian tunnel targeting to be in used around late Spring in 2015 to link up YTZ and the metropolitan district in downtown Toronto. Its operations are only limited to turboprop aircraft due to runway restrictions.

Since it is the hub of Porter Airlines, YTZ’s location and runway restrictions made Porter Airlines being a monopoly in the airport carving a niche market for short haul and business travel although Air Canada is being served in this airport as well.

The above picture shows the terminal design of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. First of all, it is designed as a small pier terminal with a long way walking from the arrival pier. Pier terminal allows most of the airport functions being centralized, for example all duty free shops and restaurants are surrounding boarding gates which enables it to have better non-aeronautical revenue as it encourages passengers to continue shopping before boarding to flights. However, this kind of terminal design comes across physical limitations as there is invalid rooms for more aircraft apron expansion, such that commercial revenues is constrained due to limited airlines and passengers.

Apart from that,