Modeling Passenger Travel and Delays in the National Air Transportation System

Abstract

Many of the existing methods for evaluating an airline's on-time performance are based on flight-centric measures of delay. However, recent research has demonstrated that passenger delays depend on many factors in addition to flight delays. For instance, significant passenger delays result from flight cancellations and missed connections, which themselves depend on a significant number of factors. Unfortunately, lack of publicly available passenger travel data has made it difficult for researchers to explore the nature of these relationships. In this paper, we develop methodologies to model historical travel and delays for U.S. domestic passengers. We develop a discrete choice model for estimating historical passenger travel and extend a previously-developed greedy reaccommodation heuristic for estimating the resulting passenger delays. We report and analyze the estimated passenger delays for calendar year 2007, developing insights into factors that affect the performance of the National Air Transportation System in the United States.Draft completed August 2 nd , 2010. IntroductionOver the past two years, flight and passenger delays have been on the decline due to reduced demand for air travel as a result of the recent economic crisis. As the economy rebounds, demand for air travel in the United States is also expected to recover (Tomer & Puentes, 2009). Thus, after a brief reprieve, the U.S.will once again face a looming transportation crisis due to air traffic congestion. In calendar year 2007, the last year of peak air travel demand before the economic downturn, flight delays were estimated to methodologies, the huge discrepancy between these estimates suggests the need for a more transparent and rigorous approach to measuring passenger delays. Accurately estimating passenger delays is important not only as a means to understand system performance, but also to motivate policy and investment decisions for the National Air Transportation System.Another important consideration is that neither of the passenger delay cost estimates listed above includes the delays associated with itinerary disruptions, such as missed connections or cancellations. Analysis performed by Bratu and Barnhart (2005) suggests that itinerary disruptions and the associated delays represent a significant component of passenger delays. Their analysis was performed using one month of proprietary passenger booking data from a legacy carrier. The challenge in extending this analysis system-wide is that publicly available data sources do not contain passenger itinerary flows. For example, on a given day, there is no way to determine how many passengers planned to take the 7:05amAmerican Airlines flight from Boston Logan (BOS) to Chicago O'Hare (ORD) followed by the 11:15amflight from Chicago O'Hare (ORD) to Los Angeles (LAX), or even the number of non-stop passengers on each of these flights. Instead, the passenger flow data that is publicly available is aggregated over time, either monthly or quarterly, and reports flows based only on...

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