Our Environment
The Sacramento County Airport System (SCAS) is responsible for providing efficient planning, development and operation of public air transportation facilities in Sacramento County.
Sacramento International Airport (SMF) is the principal air carrier airport serving a very large 29-county regional area. Without SMF, residents throughout this entire region would have to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area, or Reno to obtain major air carrier services.
Since opening in 1967, SMF has offered the community a convenient and efficient intermodal facility. However, with annual passenger traffic up nearly 100 percent since 1986, the airport served 7 million annual passengers (MAP) with an older terminal facility designed to accommodate only 3.5 MAP. Fortunately, construction of the new Terminal A was completed in October 1998. The new terminal greatly eased operational congestion. Sacramento now has an attractive new state-of-the-art facility of which we can all be proud.
Unfortunately, the Sacramento Valley Air Basin has exceeded health-based air quality standards for decades, and the airport is often targeted as a major source of emissions. Therefore, the SCAS has taken extraordinary steps to quantify its emissions associated with all aspects of airfield operations and ground transportation.
SMF is just one of many "indirect sources" in the region that create significant emissions by attracting "mobile sources" such as cars, trucks, and aircraft. Urban sprawl throughout the large geographic region has led to emissive decentralized transportation systems that are dependent upon the private automobile. In Sacramento County alone, nearly 30 million miles of vehicular travel occurs each day.
SCAS staff has developed a comprehensive computer model to estimate all airfield-related emissions. The latest available data is incorporated to compute emissions from aircraft operations, aircraft ground service equipment (GSE), and all the types of ground access vehicles.
At current passenger levels, the airport has about 160 scheduled daily flights serving about 20,000 passengers per day. This generates approximately 30,000 vehicle trips within the regional area each day. Computations show that the ground access vehicles are responsible for approximately 70% of the combined pollutants, while aircraft represent 20%, and GSE comprise about 5% of the total emissions. Placed in perspective, current total airfield-related emissions are roughly equivalent to the amount of emissions generated by the vehicles attracted to a single large regional shopping center.
Sacramento County Airport System Efforts
