01622503

Component

The authors investigate patterns of en route flight inefficiency for US domestic flights into and out of 34 major US airports, using a dataset of several million flights from the years 2013 and 2014. Following earlier work, the inefficiency metrics compare the distance flown between airport terminal exit and entry points with the achieved distance, and further isolate the effects of pre-specified, and often not ideal, entry and exit points (TMA) and excess distance flown between these points (DIR). The authors find the TMA inefficiency decreases with flight distance, while DIR inefficiency is roughly constant with distance. Inefficiency varies considerably for flights between a given airport-pair, with median values generally less than 5%. Fixed effect models reveal that origin and destination airports have significant effects on inefficiency, but there is little correlation between the origin fixed effect and destination fixed effect for a given airport. An additional model that considers fixed effects or airport-month combinations reveals departure airport-month fixed effects are stronger than those for arrival airport-month fixed effects. Despite the importance of the fixed effects, there is much unexplained variation, particularly for DIR inefficiency. This suggests the need for further research to better understand the factors that drive en route inefficiency variation in the US aviation system.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV060 Standing Committee on Airfield and Airspace Capacity and Delay.

01618707

17-06684

English

13p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Appendices; Figures; References; Tables

Airports; Flight time; Origin and destination; Performance measurement; Seasons; Trip length

United States

Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-06684

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:44PM