UCL Research Proposal Example: Airport operations manager to aviation policy (Score 93)

1. Research question and rationale Following the UK's departure from the EU, slot allocation at congested airports is governed by the Airports Slot Allocation Regulations 2006 as retained and amended, yet the framework was designed around EU coordination principles that no longer bind UK regulators. This proposal asks: does the current UK slot allocation regime adequately incorporate operational capacity evidence when determining coordination parameters, and if not, what regulatory mechanism would better align legal determinations with demonstrated airport throughput constraints? The question is bounded to coordinated UK airports and the period 2021–2024, where divergence from EU practice has become measurable. 2. Literature review and research gap Two bodies of scholarship are relevant. Economic regulation literature on slot markets, including work on secondary trading and grandfather rights, treats capacity primarily as an economic variable. Administrative law scholarship on regulatory decision-making examines how agencies incorporate technical evidence but rarely applies this to aviation infrastructure. Neither literature adequately addresses how coordination committees translate operational data — stand capacity, taxiway throughput, terminal processing rates — into legally binding coordination parameters. This operational-to-legal translation gap is the proposal's focus. 3. Research design and methods The study uses doctrinal legal analysis of the retained slot regulations, CAA coordination decisions, and published Airport Coordination Limited determinations from 2021–2024, supplemented by qualitative document analysis of coordination committee submissions where publicly available. A small set of semi-structured interviews with aviation policy practitioners is provisionally planned, subject to access. Doctrinal analysis suits the core question of legal adequacy; practitioner interviews would test whether the identified gap is experienced operationally. 4. Feasibility, ethics and timeline Primary legal materials are publicly accessible via legislation.gov.uk and CAA publications. ACL coordination reports are published annually. Interview recruitment would target publicly identified industry participants; no sensitive personal data would be collected, and standard UCL ethics procedures would apply. Timeline: doctrinal mapping in months one to three, document analysis in months three to six, interviews if approved in months five to seven, drafting from month seven. Scope is limited to UK coordinated airports; comparative EU analysis is reserved for the discussion chapter. 5. Department fit and resources UCL Laws' strength in regulatory governance and administrative law provides the analytical framework this question requires. The programme's emphasis on law in context suits a proposal bridging legal text and operational evidence.