Faaz17 Data sourcing and verification — aviation and DXB
The rule that outranks the rest
Never invent a figure, a source, a URL, a date, or a DOI. If a number cannot be traced to
a real, named, dated source, write [UNVERIFIED — needs source] and leave it visible in the
draft. A visible gap is a task; a fabricated number in a Turnitin submission is academic
misconduct.
This applies to passenger counts, capacity figures, market shares, cost estimates, runway counts, distances, dates, and every percentage. It applies equally to "approximately" and "around" — a vague fake is still a fake.
Source-quality hierarchy
Work down. Stop at the highest tier that has the number.
- Dubai Airports' own disclosures — the newsroom, annual traffic releases, the DWC expansion page, Dubai Airports corporate publications. For DXB figures this is the primary source and the brief itself points to it
- Peer-reviewed journal articles — the only tier that satisfies the five-journal requirement
- International aviation bodies — ICAO, IATA, ACI. Official, methodologically documented
- UAE government and statutory bodies — GCAA, Dubai Statistics Centre, UAE Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre, Dubai Media Office, Dubai's 2040 Urban Master Plan
- Airline disclosures — Emirates Group annual report, flydubai. Relevant because DXB's traffic is hub-dependent
- Consultancy and industry research — McKinsey, PwC, Deloitte, Oliver Wyman, ACI economics reports. Credible but promotional; read the methodology note
- Quality business press — Reuters, FT, Bloomberg, Gulf News, The National, Arabian Business, Aviation Week. For events and dates, not headline statistics
Never cite: blogs, SEO listicles, "top 10 airports" content-marketing pages, Wikipedia (follow its sources instead), AI-generated summaries, or undated pages.
The three sources the brief names
The brief explicitly encourages these. Using them is free marks for diligence.
| Source | URL | What it gives |
|---|---|---|
| ICAO Air Transport Monthly Monitor | https://www.icao.int/air-traffic-monitor |
Global traffic trends, passenger growth, forecasts. Benchmarks DXB against world and Middle East growth rates |
| Dubai World Central expansion page | https://dubaiairports.ae/corporate/our-story/dwc-dubai-world-central |
The USD 35bn Phase II programme, capacity targets, timeline, strategic rationale. Essential for task 4 |
| Dubai Airports Newsroom | https://media.dubaiairports.ae |
Annual traffic press releases back to 2013, quarterly updates, operational milestones |
Verify the brief's own data against the newsroom releases. The brief attributes its tables to "Dubai Airports, 2026". Confirming a sample of years against the original releases, and reporting that you did, demonstrates exactly the verification the rubric rewards under task 8. If a figure differs, report the discrepancy rather than silently picking one — that is analysis.
Note the brief's figures for 2024 (92,300,000) and 2025 (95,200,000) are round to the hundred thousand while earlier years are exact. That suggests rounded or provisional reporting for the recent years. Worth a sentence in the limitations.
Aviation data beyond the brief
| Need | Source |
|---|---|
| World's busiest airports by international passengers | ACI World annual traffic rankings |
| Airport service quality benchmarking | ACI Airport Service Quality (ASQ) programme |
| Global and regional traffic forecasts | IATA passenger forecasts; ICAO long-term traffic forecasts; Boeing and Airbus commercial market outlooks |
| Air transport economic contribution | ATAG Aviation: Benefits Beyond Borders; IATA economics briefings |
| Emirates hub traffic and fleet | Emirates Group Annual Report |
| Airport capacity and slot coordination methodology | IATA Worldwide Airport Slot Guidelines; EUROCONTROL for methodology precedent |
| UAE aviation regulation | UAE General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) |
| Dubai population and economic context | Dubai Statistics Centre; Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan |
| Aviation emissions and net zero | IATA net zero commitments; UAE Net Zero 2050 strategic initiative |
Academic literature — where the five journal articles come from
The requirement is a minimum of five high-quality journal articles. Search:
Google Scholar · ScienceDirect · Emerald Insight · Taylor & Francis · Wiley · JSTOR · the Middlesex library discovery service.
Journals that carry directly relevant work:
| Theme | Journals |
|---|---|
| Air transport management and airport operations | Journal of Air Transport Management; Transport Policy; Research in Transportation Economics |
| Air travel demand forecasting | Journal of Air Transport Management; Transportation Research Part A; International Journal of Forecasting |
| Airport capacity, congestion and slots | Transportation Research Part A / Part E; Transportation Science |
| Airport service quality | Journal of Air Transport Management; Total Quality Management & Business Excellence; Managing Service Quality |
| Facility location and multi-criteria decision methods | International Journal of Production Economics; European Journal of Operational Research; Omega |
| Operations and quality management generally | International Journal of Operations & Production Management; Journal of Operations Management; Production and Operations Management |
Search terms that work: airport passenger demand forecasting; air traffic forecasting error; airport capacity expansion decision; multi-airport system transition; airport service quality SERVQUAL; hub airport relocation; weighted factor location model.
Capture the DOI at the moment you find the paper. Retrofitting DOIs the night before submission is miserable and is where fabrications creep in.
Relevant precedent worth searching for: other hub relocations — Hong Kong Kai Tak to Chek Lap Kok, Denver Stapleton to DIA, Istanbul Atatürk to Istanbul Airport, Berlin Brandenburg, Bangkok Don Mueang to Suvarnabhumi. These give the "at least two industry-relevant examples" task 2 demands, and citing a real transition that overran or under-delivered is far stronger than a generic statement about forecast error.
The data-log protocol
Every figure enters 02-Analysis/data-log.md before it enters a draft.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ID | D001, D002 … — reference it in draft comments |
| Claim | What the number asserts, in one line |
| Value | Figure with unit |
| Period | The period the figure describes, not the publication year |
| Source | Full Harvard reference |
| Location | Page, table, or section within the source |
| URL | Stable direct link |
| Accessed | Date retrieved |
| Confidence | verified / secondary / estimate / unverified |
| So what | Why it matters to the COO's decision |
verified— read it in the primary source myselfsecondary— a source I read attributed it to someone else; note bothestimate— derived or calculated; show the arithmeticunverified— placeholder only; must not survive to submission
Figures the forecasting engine computes are estimate with the arithmetic shown by the
script and the workbook. That is legitimate and must be labelled as calculated output, not
presented as observed data.
Verification discipline
- Prefer the primary source. If a news article reports a Dubai Airports figure, cite Dubai Airports
- Check the period. A 2026 publication often reports 2025 data
- Check the definition. "Passengers" can mean total, international only, or arrivals-plus-departures counted once or twice. DXB's "world's busiest international airport" title rests on international passengers specifically — conflating that with total passengers is a mistake an aviation-literate marker will spot immediately
- Check the geography. DXB ≠ DWC ≠ Dubai's airport system ≠ UAE
- Check the units. Movements vs flights vs departures; millions vs absolute
- Triangulate anything load-bearing. Where sources disagree, report the range and explain the divergence — that is analysis, and it earns marks
Using data well — what earns marks
Weak: "DXB handled 95.2 million passengers in 2025 (Dubai Airports, 2026)."
Strong: "At 95.2 million passengers against a 115 million design capacity, DXB is running at roughly 83% utilisation (Dubai Airports, 2026). On the pre-COVID growth basis that headroom is exhausted by 20xx — inside the lead time for any terminal project the COO could commission today."
Every figure should either drive a decision or be cut.
Limitations to acknowledge in the conclusion
Task 7 awards marks for this explicitly. Real limitations here:
- 13 annual observations for passengers, 9 for movements — a small sample for extrapolation to 2036
- A structural break (2020–2022) sits in the middle of the passenger series
- Annual data conceals seasonality, and airport operations are acutely seasonal; peak-day and peak-hour capacity, not annual totals, is what actually binds
- The 2024 and 2025 figures are rounded, suggesting provisional reporting
- The brief's data stops at 2025; no 2026 partial-year data is incorporated
- The associative model extrapolates beyond the observed movement range (max 454,800)
- Passengers per movement is treated as stable, when it depends on aircraft gauge and load factor, both of which shift over a decade
- No cost, revenue or operational-constraint data was provided, so the location and capacity recommendations rest on published information and stated assumptions rather than internal data