THE INTERISLAND AIR TRANSPORT AS INSTRUMENT FOR TERRITORIAL COHESION:

AZORES AS A CASE STUDY.

Abstract

This article has the objective of study the inter-island aerial accessibility in the Azores Islands (Portugal).
As a space with a particular territorial fragmentation and, furthermore, distant between the different islands, air
transport is of vital importance for the socioeconomic development of the Archipelago, promoting the mobility of
residents and the increase in tourism. This is penalized in the Azores by the low demographic and economic weight,
and also by the notorious imbalance between islands. Methodologically, we study several accessibility parameters, focusing on hourly operations, since it is the one that we detected that presents the worst ratios. For this, we take the inter-island air schedules of 12 years (2009-2020) of the winter seasons, with a greater probability of use by residents and, therefore, for reasons of travel related to business, health, administration, etc. As a result of this article, we discovered that although positive work has been done with the introduction of air public service obligations, imposing a certain number of frequencies, seats, rate caps, etc., the little interest in working in an adaptation of the operating hours based on demand, is leading to availability of time for travelers at destination – in a round-trip operation on the same day, very frequent in inter-island mobility, hardly positive for travelers in more than 70% of the operational routes.