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AVIATION DEMAND FORECASTS INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND A critical element in the planning and development of airport facilities is knowing the level of passengers, aircraft movements, and cargo volumes that can be expected during a prescribed planning time period. This chapter discusses the projected activity levels for passengers, aircraft movements and air cargo that might be expected within the next 20 year planning horizon. It also describes the methodology used to estimate those volumes. The chapter concludes with recommended passenger and operations forecasts that will be used to plan the requirements for future infrastructure and facilities. The forecast is presented in five and ten year increments beginning with a base year of 2015 outward to 2020, 2025, and 2035. Changes in passenger, cargo and aircraft movement volumes are known to be influenced by a variety of elements, including variations in population, labor force, per capita income, gross regional product, air fares, competition from other airports or modes of transportation, and a variety of other economic and non-economic factors, including airline business policies and local regulatory conditions. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) annually prepares its Terminal Area Forecast (TAF) for 264 FAA towered airports, 252 federal contract tower airports, 31 terminal radar approach control facilities, and 2,818 non-towered airports. Eugene Airport (EUG) is one of these airports. For the purposes of this master plan update, the baseline forecasts for passenger, aircraft operations, and based aircraft annual volumes that will be used in planning the various airport facilities will be based on the latest FAA TAF numbers at the time of this writing. In order to account for specific conditions that have transpired since preparation of the TAF, this chapter also includes alternative forecast scenarios for commercial passenger enplanements (i.e. the number of passengers boarding an aircraft) and aircraft operations (the number of take-offs and landings). Multiple scenario-based activity estimates were generated for each of these categories of commercial passenger aviation activity. Additionally, a preferred forecast scenario was selected and refined to determine peak hour activity, which will be used for facility planning. HISTORICAL AVIATION ACTIVITY Aviation activity at an airport is defined as the amount of aircraft operations by general aviation (GA), military, and commercial aircraft, and the number of passengers that use commercial air service for their transportation needs. This section describes the historical aviation activity data for EUG. The data is used to understand previous trends and patterns at the airport, their interrelationships with key economic indexes for the airport’s catchment area, and is then used to build the forecast of future aviation activity. Passenger Traffic As shown in Table 2-1, during calendar years (CY) 2013 and 2014, EUG was the second busiest commercial airport in the State of Oregon and was ranked 126 among all commercial airports in the U.S. in terms of the number of enplaned passengers, according to FAA’s air traffic data for FY 2014. EUGENE AIRPORT MASTER PLAN 2-1