About... Contents

The idea behind this website has risen while working as a geography student at an internship at SEO Economic Research. At this internship I worked on writing a manual about two GIS (Geographical Information Systems) programs for the Aviation Economics cluster. By combining the GIS component with research related to aviation economics, in this case low-cost carriers, the foundations where laid for my graduation research at Utrecht University. By creating a website lots of information will be available to others, information which wouldn’t fit in the thesis itself and otherwise might have been lost. Using web programming techniques also gives another way of displaying geographical information, as is the case in for example the ‘network viewers’.

I would like to thank some people for their help during the research. First of all I would like to thank Guillaume Burghouwt, SEO Economical Research – Aviation cluster. With his help it became possible for me to quickly obtain knowledge on the field of aviation, and with his guidance and criticism the research had a solid take off. Also I would like to thank the rest of the aviation cluster, Merith, Linda, Jan and Jaap, who stimulated me and offered me the tools to study the aviation sector in general and provided me with the data which lays at the core of most analyses in this research. I would like to thank Tom de Jong of the Utrecht University for his advice related to the GIS program Flowmap, Bart de Jong, currently PhD student at the Utrecht University and Schiphol, for reading and criticizing parts of the research thesis, Johan Beerens, who took care of the English corrections at the site you are currently reading, Vincent Stap, for his help with some formulas used in this research. And last but not least Fred Toppen, Utrecht University, who was my research supervisor. He guided me during the whole research flight, his support and advice guaranteed a save landing. With his help and that of the others, the research became to what it is now, a full-service graduation research!

Thanks!

Jeroen van der Zwan