Activity Forecast — Tool Guide

Who It's For & When to Use It

Airport planners producing master plans, planning studies, and FAA-submitted activity forecasts. Use it when you need a baseline operations and based-aircraft forecast that passes the APP-400 TAF consistency check, when determining the critical aircraft per runway for design, when building constrained or conceptual scenarios around a known capacity limit, when you need peaking and fleet-mix breakdowns for sizing, or when you need a narrative draft and a citation trail you can defend in a planning study.

How to Use It

1. Classify the airport. The classifier runs first — it tailors which forecast components apply. Look the airport up by FAA LID or ICAO to auto-pull its NPIAS hub category and service level, then confirm or override airport class, service level, hub type, and the Towered flag. Towered is shown from NASR as reference only and is never auto-selected — you must choose it, because it changes which components apply (memo §4 TAF-in-lieu, §5 streamlined, §6a benchmark).
2. Set the base year and base values. Enter the base year, the forecast offsets (years out — 5, 10, 20), and the base-year operations, based aircraft, and enplanements. Form 5010 activity is no longer in NASR (it moved to ADIP), so activity baselines come from the TAF upload — enter the values your TAF or Aerospace forecast supports.
3. Define the scenarios. Set baseline, constrained, and conceptual growth rates per memo §3 — not high/base/low. The baseline is the only FAA-approved scenario; a constrained scenario must name the binding capacity constraint per §3b; the conceptual scenario is a never-approved what-if.
4. Run the TAF consistency check. Upload the official FAA bulk TAF XLSX files (operations, based aircraft, enplanements) and run the memo §6a check: under 10% at year 5, under 15% at year 10, and 0.5 percentage points per year for years 11–20. Towered airports benchmark against the current TAF automatically; non-towered airports supply FAA Aerospace Forecast rates with a mandatory source label.
5. Determine critical aircraft per runway. Add each runway and its fleet to run the AC 150/5000-17 determination: the 500-operation regular-use threshold (excluding touch-and-go), cumulative grouping of similar-characteristics aircraft, and TFMSC 2x normalization. Enter a designator or a manual AAC/ADG/TDG per fleet row.
6. Add peaking and fleet mix. Optionally compute peak activity (AC 150/5070-6B ¶803.b — peak month and design hour, with labeled planning-convention defaults of 10% and 12.5%) and fleet mix (based aircraft by TAF category, with default growth rates from the FAA Aerospace Forecast and a source label required for custom rates).
7. Elect the streamlined path if eligible. If the airport is non-towered, under 90,000 annual operations, and you have supplied critical aircraft, elect the memo §5 streamlined attestation path — the §6a consistency check is skipped per §5.
8. Build the forecast. Run the build to produce the on-page JSON report or the XLSX workbook with Peak Activity, Fleet Mix, and Charts sheets.
9. Review the narrative draft and export. Copy the generated narrative draft for your study, review the local-influences disclaimer, and export the forecast as JSON or the charted XLSX workbook for inclusion in the planning study.

Key Features

• Classification-tailored workflow. The classifier runs first and decides which components apply — hub category and NPIAS service level auto-populate from the NPIAS dataset by FAA LID (NASR doesn't carry them), with precedence explicit class > hub type > service level > NPIAS > NASR inference.
• APP-400 TAF consistency check. The memo §6a thresholds (<10% yr 5, <15% yr 10, 0.5 pp yrs 11–20) are checked against the official bulk TAF files, with separate towered and non-towered benchmarks.
• Memo §3 scenario taxonomy. Baseline / constrained / conceptual — the FAA-approved structure, with a required binding constraint on any constrained scenario per §3b.
• Per-runway critical aircraft. AC 150/5000-17 determination with the 500-op regular-use rule, similar-characteristics grouping, TFMSC 2x normalization, and a per-runway App A decision tool for crosswind/secondary runways.
• Peaking, fleet mix, and regression. Peak-hour-of-the-ADPM peaking, based-aircraft fleet mix by category, and independent-variable regression with BEA socioeconomic auto-pull and an R² readout for commercial airports.
• Narrative draft and citation trail. A narrative draft and the local-influences disclaimer come back with the forecast, and every threshold is cited to the AC and memo PDFs rather than hardcoded in the page.
• JSON and charted XLSX export. Output as an on-page JSON report or an XLSX workbook with Peak Activity, Fleet Mix, and Charts sheets (line and bar charts).

FAA References

• AC 150/5070-6B, Airport Master Plans — governing standard for activity forecasting; trend methods (¶704.d), peaking (¶803.b).
• FAA APP-400 memo (August 2024), Forecast Approval Process — TAF consistency check (§6a), scenario taxonomy (§3), streamlined path (§5), revalidation (§7).
• AC 150/5000-17, Critical Aircraft and Regular Use Determination — per-runway critical aircraft, the 500-operation regular-use threshold, similar-characteristics grouping, and the Appendix A decision tool.
• AC 150/5060-5, Airport Capacity and Delay — design-day flight schedule analysis.

Limitations & Disclaimers

AvPlot is technical planning production support — accurate enough for design reports, planning studies, and ALP narratives. It is not a replacement for stamped engineering or construction documents. Forecasts produced here support a planning study; FAA approval of the forecast follows the agency's own review process, and all values must be verified against current FAA publications before submittal.

• The tool produces a forecast and its consistency check; it does not constitute FAA forecast approval, which follows the APP-400 review process.
• The baseline is the only FAA-approved scenario — constrained and conceptual scenarios are planning analyses, and the conceptual scenario is never approved.
• Default peaking factors (10% / 12.5%) and Aerospace Forecast fleet rates are labeled planning conventions; custom rates require a source label, and the AC gives no numeric peaking factors of its own.
• The local-influences disclaimer returned with the forecast applies — a forecast reflects only the drivers and assumptions you supply.

Related Tools

• Aircraft Classification Library — find the AAC/ADG/TDG and designators that feed the critical-aircraft fleet rows (guide).
• ARP Lookup — confirm the FAA Airport Reference Point and identity before classifying (guide).
• ALP Data Tables — carry the forecast activity and critical aircraft into the ALP data-table package (guide).

Tips & Best Practices

• Classify before you forecast: look the airport up first so NPIAS hub category and service level auto-populate, then set the Towered flag yourself — it gates the streamlined path and the TAF benchmark.
• Download the official bulk TAF files from taf.faa.gov before you start — the §6a check needs the official XLSX, not a transcribed table.
• Lead with the baseline scenario — it is the only FAA-approved one. Add a constrained scenario only when a real capacity limit binds, and name that constraint explicitly per §3b.
• Build critical aircraft from the design fleet, not memory: pull designators from the Aircraft Classification Library so the AAC/ADG/TDG grouping is consistent.
• If you supply custom peaking or Aerospace rates, always attach the source label — an unlabeled custom rate is not defensible in a planning study.
• Export the charted XLSX for the study appendix and copy the narrative draft as your starting prose — then reconcile both against the local-influences disclaimer.