What factors predict the type of person who is willing to fly in an autonomous commercial airplane?

There has been much discussion and research lately highlighting autonomous commercial flight, with most of the focus on engineering design and legal issues. Some prior research has shown that many people are generally not willing to fly in fully autonomous aircraft; however, there is a significant proportion of society that is willing to use these types of airplanes. It is critical for the aviation industry to be able to identify these individuals as they will likely be the early adopters. The current study was designed with the purpose of determining what factors predict the type of person who would be willing to fly in fully autonomous commercial airplanes. We provided a hypothetical scenario to 1042 potential passengers from the United States and asked them to rate their willingness to fly in that situation. We also collected demographic data, along with ratings of various scales to determine what predictors were significant in a regression model. In Stage 1, we built the model from a dataset of 522 participants and determined that the significant factors were familiarity with autonomous flight, fun factor, general wariness of new technology, happiness, fear, age, and educational level. This model accounted for 85.9% of the variance in the data. In Stage 2, we tested the model with 520 participants and found excellent model fit. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.     

An exploratory empirical analysis of willingness to hire and pay for flying taxis and shared flying car services

A new transportation mode that can simultaneously operate on land and in the air, namely the flying cars, is anticipated to penetrate the automobile fleet between 2020 and 2025. Due to their flexible mobility patterns and automated operational characteristics, flying taxi and shared flying car services are expected to expand the existing shared mobility services (such as Uber, Lyft, and similar services) of the urban transportation network. Despite their forthcoming introduction in the shared mobility market, public perceptions and expectations about these services have not been investigated in travel demand literature. This study aims to provide an exploratory analysis of public willingness to hire and pay for flying taxis and shared flying car services, and to identify the determinants of the willingness to hire and pay for such services. Using data collected from an online survey, individuals' willingness to hire and to pay for flying taxi and shared flying car services are statistically modeled within a correlated grouped random parameters bivariate probit framework. The analysis shows that various socio-demographic characteristics and individuals’ opinions towards the perceived benefits and challenges of flying cars affect public willingness to hire and pay for flying taxi and shared flying car services. Even though the awareness about the operation of flying taxis and shared flying car services is possibly limited in the public sphere, the findings of this study can provide insights into the challenges that policymakers, manufacturing companies, and shared mobility providers will face with the introduction of such flying car services in the transportation networks.     

Willingness to pay for safety improvements in passenger air travel

The risk of being involved in an airplane accident is largely ignored in air passengers’ choice models. The reason presumably is that it is hard to operationalize, because objective safety indicators often involve extremely low probabilities that are hard to grasp and interpret by passengers. In this paper, we propose an operationalization that is based on the perception of safety, which is easy to understand and resonates that perceptions often influence decisions stronger than objective variables. We conceptualize that passengers form a safety perception score of a particular flight based on their perception of airline and route attributes and that this score in turn is traded-off against other flight attributes, such as ticket costs, to arrive at a flight choice. In line with this conceptualization, two stated preference experiments are conducted. In a first experiment, combinations of airline and route attributes are evaluated in terms of safety that is captured on a rating scale. In a second experiment, safety perception is treated as an attribute and traded-off against other flight attributes to arrive at a flight choice. The paper presents the results of a regression and a Panel Mixed Logit model estimated from responses obtained from a convenience sample of 161 air passengers recruited in the Netherlands. The results of both models are then combined to calculate the willingness to pay values for improvements made to a range of airline and route attributes, taking into account socio-demographic variables and psychological traits. As expected, the results indicate that the willingness to pay for improving safety decreases with higher initial safety levels.     

Analysis of Iranian passengers' behavior in choosing type of carrier in international air travel to East Asia

Increased demand for East Asia flights from Tehran has intensified competition between Iranian and foreign carriers. In addition, the entrance of low-cost carriers (LCC) will make this competitive market even more intense. In this condition, carriers are striving to gain more market share by improving services and discounting their fares. Therefore, analyzing air travel demand is valuable for carriers' long term and short term planning. This study empirically investigates passengers' behavior in choosing five types of carriers in many groups of passengers using multinomial logit (MNL) and nested logit (NL) models. The data were collected through the stated preference (SP) questionnaire designed based on orthogonal main-effect. The main survey was conducted in the Imam Khomeini International (IKI) airport in July 2013 where 480 questionnaires were collected through face-to-face interviews. The results show that the ticket fare, the possibility of travel on desired date and time, international air travel experience, Frequent-flyer program (FFP) membership status, marital status, and gender are statistically significant contributors in explaining carrier choice. Interaction effects between trip purpose and ticket fare are statistically significant in choosing carriers. The results further indicate that business travelers are more willing to pay than non-business travelers for flights on desired date and time, although varying by type of carrier.     

A cointegration analysis of bilateral air travel flows: The case of international travel to and from the United States

Demand for international air travel has risen over the past decade causing international visitation to the US to reach a record high in 2012. This paper assesses the dynamic impacts of GDP, exchange rate, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on bilateral air travel flows between the US and its 11 major travel and trading partners. An autoregressive distributed lag modeling approach is employed to estimate short- and long-run relationships between variables. Long-run results demonstrate foreign GDP as the major determinant of demand for inbound travel to the US and US GDP is a crucial factor affecting demand for outbound travel from the US. These findings support a strong linkage between economic growth and demand for international air travel. The real exchange rate has relatively little impact on the bilateral air travel flows. The US dollar appreciation against foreign currencies is found to reduce demand for inbound travel to the US, while having mixed effects on outbound travel from the US. In the short-run, economic growth tends to be a primary factor influencing international travel flows to and from the US. The 9/11 market shock has a detrimental short- and long-run effect on the bilateral air travel flows, implying that the impact of 9/11 is prolonged in international air travel markets.