Network development and excess travel time

Abstract

We study the impact of airline network design on excess travel times for the main US carriers between 2008 and 2017 and find that network configuration affects excess travel time. Based on graph theory and a principal component analysis we build four continuous indicators to measure the airlines networks. We observe that airlines serving more destinations, organizing flights landings and take offs around banks or moving towards a point to point configuration present higher levels of excess travel time. However, there does not seem to exist a preferred network configuration between hub and spoke or point-to-point configuration to reduce excess travel time. We also find a nonlinear impact of competition measured at the citypair level over excess travel time. These results are robust when analyzing observed delays rather than excess travel time.

Airport Dominance, Route Network Design and Flight Delays

“…They show that while airlines operating fully connected configurations reduce frequencies in response to delays, airlines operating hub-and-spoke networks increase them, even if this is at the expense of greater congestion at their hub airports. Roucolle et al (2020) analyzed the impact of network design on excess travel times for the main US carriers between 2008 and 2017. They found that bigger airlines (in terms of the number of city pairs served by the airline) show higher values for excess travel time and delays.…”