Development of a Network of Landing Sites and Heliports: Ensuring Aviation Accessibility of Settlements in the Arctic Regions

Abstract

While considering the problems of ensuring aviation accessibility of remote settlements in the regions of the Eastern Arctic Area of Russia, the study has concretised the concept of aviation accessibility of a settlement.The analysis of aviation mobility of the population of the Arctic zone of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was carried out. It has been established that the lack of a sufficient number of landing sites is a limiting factor in performance of regular flights between settlements and the centres of the Arctic regions. Under these conditions, local flights are carried out mainly by MI-8 helicopters which are expensive in operation, with extremely low regularity and not full load.To justify the construction of a network of landing sites in the Arctic region, a methodology has been developed for predicting seasonal distribution of passenger flows within local air transportation. This methodology is based on Ward’s hierarchical clustering method, which allows, considering many criteria, to divide all settlements into clusters, in each of which the demand for air transportation is present during a certain number of months.It is substantiated that construction of a landing site in a settlement is necessary if there is a demand for air transportation for more than five months a year. Using the example of 65 Arctic settlements of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), five clusters were identified. For three of them the need to build landing sites is proved. The zones of gravity of regional airports with a range of 150 km were determined, considering the possibility to get from the settlement to the airport in 3–4 hours. Based on the results of clustering and identification of gravity areas of regional airports, a predictable network of landing sites in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was built.