Insight into the nature and size of the airport catchment area is important. The size of the originating market is a significant determinant of airport performance, in term of its attractiveness to airlines. And the catchment area analysis also helps airport managers and policy makers in the forecasting of passenger demand. However, calculating the potential size of the catchment area is not as straightforward. This paper reviews and discusses different methods that had been applied to measure the airport catchment area. And then, take the airport group of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei for example. We calculated the airports catchment areas using different methods (such as concentric circles method, isochrones method, Huff model and Weighted Voronoi Figure method). Finally, we propose the forecast to the future research on the airport catchment area measurement. We found that ①the concentric circles method and isochrones method are both simple. These methods need less data and could present overlapping effects of airport catchment. Unfortunately, these two methods don’t consider the comprehensive attraction of the airport, and the results based on these methods are not accord with the reality; ②the catchment area calculated by the Huff model is more reliable than the results of the first two methods, because the Huff model considered the total number of enplanements as the indicator for measuring the attractive. Nevertheless, estimating the parameters for the model is the hardest part of applying the Huff model;③The Weighted Vironoi Figure method can take into account many indexes for evaluating the catchment area of the airport, and don’t need to set the parameters. Therefore, the result based on this method seems better than that based on the Huff model.Future, we should take the full advantage of the cell phone signaling data for monitoring the airport catchment area dynamically, and in combination with the questionnaire survey to illustrate the mechanism behind the phenomenon.