The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the air transportation system worldwide. This paper aims at analyzing the effect of the travel restriction measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic from a passenger perspective on the US air transportation system. Four metrics based on data generated by passengers and airlines on social media are proposed to measure how the travel restriction measures impacted the relation between passengers and airlines in close to real-time. The proposed metrics indicate that each airline has reacted differently to the COVID-19 travel restriction measures from a passenger perspective, therefore they can be used by airlines and passengers to improve their decision making process. This report comes ahead of official data related to the same sequence of events, thereby showing the value of passenger-borne data in an industry where corporate priorities, institutional prudence, and passenger satisfaction come close together.

Passengers' experience is becoming a key metric to evaluate the air transportation system's performance. Efficient and robust tools to handle airport operations are needed along with a better understanding of passengers' interests and concerns. Among various airport operations, this paper studies airport gate scheduling for improved passengers' experience. Three objectives accounting for passengers, aircraft, and operation are presented. Trade-offs between these objectives are analyzed, and a balancing objective function is proposed. The results show that the balanced objective can improve the efficiency of traffic flow in passenger terminals and on ramps, as well as the robustness of gate operations.

and to Alexei Pozdnukhov at Replica for the ongoing cooperation. Alex Weinberg provided outstanding research assistance throughout this project. We also thank Stephen Eubank and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute, Tim Bresnahan, Matt Jackson, and Mike Whinston for their insightful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w27374.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

and to Alexei Pozdnukhov at Replica for the ongoing cooperation. Alex Weinberg provided outstanding research assistance throughout this project. We also thank Stephen Eubank and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute, Tim Bresnahan, Matt Jackson, and Mike Whinston for their insightful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w27374.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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This paper aims at presenting a detailed analysis of domestic air passengers behavior during a major airtraffic disturbance, from two complementary passenger-centric perspective: a passenger mobility perspective and a passenger social media perspective. By leveraging over 5 billion records of mobile phone location data per day from a major carrier in the United States, passenger mobility can be reliably analyzed, no matter which airline the passengers fly on or which airport they fly to and from. Such information is currently unavailable to the major aviation stakeholders at such scale and can be used to establish performance benchmarks from a passenger's perspective. Combining it with a Twitter analysis provides a more detailed and passenger-focused analysis than the traditional flight-centric measurements used to evaluate the overall system performance. More generally, these two passenger-centric analysis could be implemented in real-time for a daily evaluation of the Air Transportation System, enabling a faster analysis of the impact of major disruptions, whether due to meteorological conditions or system failures.

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Abstract-With the predicted growth of air traffic, traffic flow managers need new tools to access information to support their decision making processes. Recent progress with information visualization tools enables users to explore large data sets and extract decisive knowledge. Their advantages for air traffic applications are presented in this paper. They can provide high level information to aggregate trajectories. With constant feedback due to human perception, a flow model of the airspace, reflecting its intrinsic structure, is elaborated and can be used for further research.