Factors Influencing Flight Delays of a European Airline

Abstract

The main aim of the paper was to investigate factors influencing flight delays of a European airline. Besides the identification and analysis of those factors the paper offers possible suggestions on how to eliminate the delays. The research is based on data acquired over the period of time spanning from June to September in 2008 -2014. Analysis of contingency tables, including Pearson's chi-squared test, has been used for data processing. The dependencies have been presented in graphical form by using correspondence maps. The proportion of delayed flights reaches approx. 50 % during nearly the entire monitored period only in September the proportion drops to 45 %. Flight delays are most frequently caused by delays of previous flights of the same plane. These previous delayed flights are the main culprit of long delays and the frequency of delay occurrence caused by this reason increases significantly during the day. Longer delays of flights appear also due to technical maintenance or aircraft defects. On the contrary other factors such as operational control and crew duty norms, air traffic control and airport limitations tend to cause rather shorter delays of flights with the air traffic control encountering more problems with coordination of flights in the early morning. The supply and service companies also manage to eliminate long delays.

Flight Delay Causes at Selected Visegrad Group International Airports

“…Our analysis has proven that delays triggered in association with passengers and their baggage are not a common problem at the airports under review; the articles by Huang et al (2016) and Abdelghany et al (2006) deal with the question of how to solve the possible problems in this area. Zámková et al (2017) proved that the most frequent cause of delay is the propagation of delays, which tends to increase during the day. According to our analysis of home base V4 airports, the longest delays (two hours or more) occur at night and again, the delay propagation is to blame.…”

“…The research by Zámková et al (2017) This paper starts with an analysis of all flights operated by the selected airline in the given period and selected V4 destinations, regarding: Total number of delayed flights, number of delayed flights considering the flight type, aircraft type, and the time period (summer season of 2015). Next, statistical testing (including the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test for abnormalities in the distribution of the random variable) allowed for the assessment of statistically significant differences between the groups.…”

“…Plus, the later in the day, the more delays caused by this reason occur. Compared to the abovementioned paper byZámková et al (2017), the current research uses more recent data (2015) only from major Visegrad Group airports, allowing for the generalization of results to fit the airports in Central Europe.…”

Multi-objective Analysis of Condition-based Aircraft Maintenance Strategies using Discrete Event Simulation

“…One main objective of CBM for aircraft is the reduction of maintenance costs [5,6]. Additionally, aircraft maintenance aims to comply with aircraft operational regulations [3,7], to limit the need for unscheduled maintenance tasks [8], to reduce aircraft delays due to maintenance [9], and to utilize the aircraft as much as possible [10]. Given these multiple objectives, it is of interest to understand how they are impacted by maintenance strategies, how they are related to each other, and what are the trade-offs between them.…”

Prediction of Flight Time Deviation for Lithuanian Airports Using Supervised Machine Learning Model

“…No matter what kind of delays is analyzed, all are described and presented in delay codes by the International Air Transport Association [ 5 ]. The codes can be used to different data mining-based approaches as a class value when the influence of the specific factors is analyzed [ 6 ]. Certainly, flight delay depends on so many factors; so to avoid at least basic problems, the airport structure optimization must be done [ 7 ].…”