Originally Posted by
kcockayne
That is, there are too many a/c wishing to operate into these airports because the runway capacity is less than the demand.
Presumably by "demand" you mean the actual number of aircraft using the runways. By definition, that can't exceed capacity.
In an ideal world, there would be a bit of headroom between the number of slots allocated and theoretical capacity of the runways (and the other airport/airspace infrastructure). In practice, planning to utilise 99% of that capacity during large parts of the operating day is inevitably going to result in delays, airborne holding and other inefficiencies, even on a good day.
Of course you can't blame airports that operate in the private sector for wanting to maximise shareholder value, revenue and profit by sweating their assets to the maximum. But anyone who thinks that adding more capacity while still planning to operate at an unrealistically high utilisation % is going to solve the problem, is living in a dream world.