How Late Does Your Flight Depart? A Quantile Regression Approach for a Chinese Case Study

Zhe Zheng,Wenbin Wei,Bo Zou,Minghua Hu

doi:10.3390/su122410553

Abstract

Flight departure delays cost airlines and airports millions of dollars and become a systematic problem. The on-time performance at an airport is connected to and easily affected by delay propagation from previous operations of flights using the airport. In this paper, we employ both Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and quantile regressions to investigate the impact of various influencing factors on flight departure delay. By using historical flight records and weather information, the impacts of delay propagation-related and other factors are quantified to study the correlations between the explanatory and response variables. Three variables, including previous arrival delay, turnaround buffer time, and the first order of a day, are used to examine the propagation effects. We find that aircraft type, flying on a weekday, and being the first flight of a day have significant impacts on short departure delays. Ground buffer is conducive to mitigating delay propagation. For long delays, however, ground buffer cannot work in an efficient way, and the previous arrival effect is more important. Convective weather and aircraft type are the crucial factors in this situation. Interestingly, flying on a weekday suddenly becomes one of the main components under extreme delays. Meanwhile, propagated delay and airport congestion remain significantly impactful on the on-time performance.

Highlights

With an eightfold increase in global air traffic between 1978 and 2017 [1], flight delay has become a major problem for many air transportation systems worldwide, costing airlines and passengers billions of dollars each year [2,3,4,5,6]
This paper focuses on investigating factors influencing flight departure delay using historic records at Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG), one of the busiest airports in China
An empirical investigation is conducted on the effect of both delay propagation-related and other factors for flight departure delay, using flight data at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in China

Summary

Introduction

With an eightfold increase in global air traffic between 1978 and 2017 [1], flight delay has become a major problem for many air transportation systems worldwide, costing airlines and passengers billions of dollars each year [2,3,4,5,6]. This is especially the case for China, which has one of the largest and fastest-growing air transportation systems in the world. Besides financial losses due to regulatory penalty as well as increased operating cost, flight delays result in complaints about airline service quality and reputation damage to airlines

Results

Discussion

Conclusion