A Comparative Analysis of Delay Propagation on Departure and Arrival Flights for a Chinese Case Study

Zhe Zheng,Wenbin Wei,Minghua Hu

doi:10.3390/aerospace8080212

Zhe Zheng, Wenbin Wei + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace8080212

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Abstract

In recent years, flight delay costs the air transportation industry millions of dollars and has become a systematic problem. Understanding the behavior of flight delay is thus critical. This paper focuses on how flight delay is affected by operation-, time-, and weather-related factors. Different econometric models are developed to analyze departure and arrival delay. The results show that compared to departure delay, arrival delay is more likely to be affected by previous delays and the buffer effect. Block buffer presents a reduction effect seven times greater than turnaround buffer in terms of flight delays. Departure flights suffer more delays from convective weather than arrival flights. Convective weather at the destination airport for flight delay has a greater impact than at the original airport. In addition, sensitivity analysis of flight delays from an aircraft utilization perspective is conducted. We find that the effect of delay propagation on flight delay differs by aircraft utilization. This impact on departure delay is greater than the impact on arrival delay. In general, specific to the order of flights, the previous delay increases the impact on flight on-time performance as a flight flies a later leg. Buffer time has opposite effects on departure and arrival delay, with the order increasing. A decrease in buffer time with the order increasing, however, still has a greater reduction effect on departure delay than arrival delay. Specific to the number of flights operated by an aircraft, the more flights an aircraft flies in a day, the more the on-time performance of those flights will suffer from the previous delay and buffer time generally.

Highlights

With continuous development of the world economy, flight demands have witnessed raid growth in the past decades
The variable of interest is the buffer effect, including TT_dif in the DelayDep model and BT_dif in the DelayArr model, which presents the propagation effect from different perspectives with the previous delay. Both TT_dif and BT_dif indicate negative signs for departure and arrival delay, respectively, and confirm Hypothesis 2, that flights with larger buffer times will have more capacity to reduce flight delays
One contribution of this research is that econometric models are used to study the departure and arrival delays considering the operation, time, and weather-related variables in the main airports of China’s air traffic network

Summary

Introduction

With continuous development of the world economy, flight demands have witnessed raid growth in the past decades. The runway and airspace capacity are still not enough to manage a large number of flights. This situation has led to serious en-route and terminal traffic congestion causing rampant flight delays. According to the Joint Economic Committee report, flight delay cost the U.S aviation industry almost $12 billion in 2007 [2]. In China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) introduced a series of new regulations to prevent flight delays, such as a fine of up to 30,000 RMB when a serious flight delay occurs [3]. The airline industry itself has made significant efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of flight delays. An effective method for airlines is to adjust flight schedules to absorb delays and prevent current delays from being propagated [5,6]

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