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BITRE | Report 115one) provided more than four return flights daily (Table 6.15). However, despite only4.72 per cent of the population from UC/Ls living within access distance to mediumairports, all medium-sized airports provided return air flights at least daily to fourtimes daily a week. Similarly, most small airports provided an average of at least dailyreturn flights or more a week, even though the total possible market size was lessthan 1 per cent of the population from UC/Ls.Table 6.15 Distribution of regional airports: airport size by flightfrequency, 2005Flight frequencyNo. of airports(Return flights per week)Large airports Medium airports Small airports Rural airportsWeekly or less 0 0 0 20Two to four times per week 0 0 2 24Five to six times per week 0 0 4 22Daily to four times daily 1 12 30 15More than four times daily 19 19 2 0Total 20 31 38 81Source: BITRE time series estimates.As discussed in the earlier section, there were 68 UC/Ls that contained 1.27 per centof population, living within the assumed access distance to at least one rural airport.These were scattered within the access distance to 81 rural airports. Table 6.15 showsthat most rural airports offered fewer return flights a week than other airport sizes in2005. A quarter of all rural airports provided an average one return flight per week orless, 30 per cent provided return flights of an average two to four times a week, and27 per cent provided return flights of an average four to six times a week.As discussed in Chapter 2, around 68 per cent of all regional airports were servedby a single operator. It is not surprising to see that the number of airlines served atan airport decreases with airport size. Most rural airports were served by a singleoperator (Table 6.16). As discussed in section 6.1 (Figure 6.1), while there were 20 largeregional airports providing services to the majority (78.3 per cent) of the total passengermovements at all regional airport in 2005, there were 81 rural regional airports servingonly 1.16 per cent of the total passenger movements at all regional airports.Figure 6.4 shows a clear contrast between the numbers of regional airports by airportsize versus the population distributions by airport size. While the number of regionalairports increases as the airport size decreases, the number of population increasesgreatly with the increase in airport size. The potential market for the 81 rural regionalairports is about 1.3 per cent of the population from all UC/Ls (Figure 6.4). Due to thesmall market size, it is expected that most of the rural airports are unable to attractmore than one airline. Table 6.16 shows that this is indeed the case.Overall, the evidence indicates that smaller airports tend to be served by fewerairlines, provide less service and offer limited destination options. Driven by theneed to maintain profitability, the decision of an airline on what market to serve andhow to serve is largely dependent on air passenger demand.As the number of seats has to be filled to cover costs, markets with a small passengerdemand often struggle to reach the break-even load factor of an aircraft. Given the174