Predictability of Flight Arrival Times Using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network

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The rapid growth in air traffic has led to increasing congestion at airports, creating bottlenecks that disrupt ground operations and compromise the efficiency of air traffic management (ATM). Ensuring the predictability of ground operations is vital for maintaining the sustainability of the ATM sector. Flight efficiency is closely tied to adherence to assigned airport arrival and departure slots, which helps minimize primary delays and prevents cascading reactionary delays. Significant deviations from scheduled arrival times—whether early or late—negatively impact airport operations and air traffic flow, often requiring the imposition of Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) regulations to accommodate demand fluctuations. This study leverages a data-driven machine learning approach to enhance the predictability of in-block and landing times. A Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network was trained using a dataset that integrates flight trajectories, meteorological conditions, and airport operations data. The model demonstrated high accuracy in predicting landing time deviations, achieving a Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) of 8.71 min and showing consistent performance across various long-haul flight profiles. In contrast, in-block time predictions exhibited greater variability, influenced by limited data on ground-level factors such as taxi-in delays and gate availability. The results highlight the potential of deep learning models to optimize airport resource allocation and improve operational planning. By accurately predicting landing times, this approach supports enhanced runway management and the better alignment of ground handling resources, reducing delays and increasing efficiency in high-traffic airport environments. These findings provide a foundation for developing predictive systems that improve airport operations and air traffic management, with benefits extending to both short- and long-haul flight operations.