Airport Apron Management and Control (ACRP Report 62)

The ACRP report 62 "Airport Apron Management and Control Programs" (click here) is primarily focused on safety on the aircraft parking apron. It also talks about regulations and who is responsible for those regulations and safety on the apron or ramp.


I found it useful because it contains information about how airport aprons/ramps are managed and contains case studies of different airports.   This report also has extensive coverage about apron management and control practices outside the United States.

The following is a partial extract from Section 9 of the report:

"U.S. airports do not typically provide the same level of active management and control of the apron environment as is provided at non-U.S. airports. Instead, U.S. airports rely primarily on the tenant airlines and ground service providers to safely and effectively manage the leased apron environment and to comply with operating procedures in the common-use (typically unleased) non-movement areas.

As expected, at the airports outside the United States, apron management and control is typically much more centralized through a specific apron control unit or department. These non-U.S. airports are typically responsible for more functions than airports in the United States, including gate allocation and assignment, ground handling, and integration with air traffic control. This is in part due to the lower prevalence of exclusive-use facility leases at non-U.S. airports. With facilities (i.e., gates) operated on a preferential or common-use basis, non-U.S. airports tend to play a more active role in the management and control of the apron areas.

 In the United States, the respective airports and tenant airlines share responsibility for these functions. In the cases where an airline uses a contractor for specific servicing func-tions like ground handling, catering, or fueling, the operational coordination is directly between the airline and the contractor, without involvement by the airport.  Airports typically do regulate the standards by which the contractor must operate in the apron area, but these are typically the same requirements and standards placed on an airline.

Outside the United States, apron management and control programs have evolved away from the need to allocate resources, specifically aircraft parking positions/gates (as well as ticketing and baggage claim areas), which are structured as common-use positions where the airport assigns aircraft to specific gates on a dynamic basis based on demand and specific aircraft type/size. This differs from the exclusive/ preferential-use model that is prevalent in the United States whereby the airlines lease specific gates and the apron areas associated with those gates and are responsible for managing the operations within that leased space.

In the United States, the gate assignments for the most part are made by the leasing airlines, which, as noted, have access to a specific set of gates that are leased under exclusive-/preferential-use terms. In some cases, there are U.S. airports that control common-use gates or remote aircraft parking positions. In these cases, the operations department for the airports is generally responsible for allocating those resources, but it was not observed to be on a scale comparable to Toronto, Beijing, or Zurich. The common-use gates observed in the United States were not used on a regular basis but more typically on a contingency basis as in the event of a charter flight or unplanned maintenance issue requiring a parking position outside of an airline's exclusively or preferentially leased gates.

These differing lease structures represent the single biggest difference in how the responsibilities of apron management are approached within and outside the United States. Although the apron control units outside the United States are primarily responsible for gate allocation, they offer a  single department from which all aspects of apron control can be managed. In the United States the operational and safety functions performed by those airports' apron control units are the same functions performed by a combination of parties: airport, airlines, and ground handling companies."

Sections 9.1 and 9.2 further elaborate on Non-US and US Airport Apron Management and Control.