Common Use and Joint Use

(Draft October 20, 2022 by Dafang Wu; PDF Version)

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tells us that we all eventually need esteem and self-actualization. Feeling professional is one important step to achieve that stage, and we should work on it whenever we can. Years of experience is a direct metric when claiming a professional status, so I update my resume at least annually. When I did not have an impressive number in my early years, I always wonder whether I can use my actual working hours divided by 2,000 to calculate an effective years of experience. It is a bit sad to realize that I no longer need to do that.

The second level of feeling professional is to use abbreviations without explaining. When someone does not know what CPE stands for, we have a proud sense that we belong to a cozy circle of airport finance and they are new!

The third level of feeling professional is to use defined terms precisely. I cherish the old days when we all meet in a big conference room flipping through POS (reminder: you have to know what POS is). When someone asks whether a word in a sentence should be capitalized or not, sometimes I raise my head and see the bond counsel looking at me, “Ha! This question again!” That will make my day. Unfortunately you cannot get that pleasure in Zoom meetings.

The fourth level of feeling professional is to know some details that are completely useless, like some airports defined landed weight as the maximum weight approved by the FAA and some airports define as the maximum landing weight approved by the FAA. In reality, they probably are all using MTOW, but that does not diminish my satisfaction that I know the difference!

This brings us to the topic today: common use vs. joint use.

There is a short window of asking stupid questions when we start a new job, but I was many years late when I began to wonder the difference between common use and joint use. I quietly observed a few years, and felt the distinction is:

• When two or more airlines can use certain space but only one airline can use it at a time, then it may be common use space. For example, when American Airlines staff use a common use ticket counter, they will login a computer and start processing passengers. They probably will not allow someone from United Airlines standing behind the same counter smiling.
• When two or more airlines can use certain space at the same time, then it may be joint use space. For example, there is a large area of baggage claim belts and many airlines are using it, then it is joint use space. Tug drive is another example.

I talked with a few colleagues and cannot find a conclusion. Depending on how we identify the space, some areas like baggage makeup can probably be common use or joint use.

So I looked at the recent airline agreements:

There is probably no real need to separate common use from joint use, so some airports decide to call everything common use instead. Maybe we should start using “shared use” to avoid the distinction between common use and joint use, but we need to feel professional whenever we can, right?