01049294

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2007-03

http://scholar.google.com...ohue&publication_year=2007

The raison d’être for the national air transportation system (ATS) is the movement of passengers and cargo. Thus, passenger trip time performance is positively correlated with passenger satisfaction, airfare elasticity, and airline profits. Regulatory consumer information available to airline passengers provides measures of trip performance by using the percentage of on-time flights or on-time percentage (OTP) (e.g., 15-OTP metric). Researchers have shown that these flight-based metrics are poor proxies for passenger trip time performance. First, these metrics do not include the trip delays accrued by passengers rebooked because of canceled flights (which account for 40% of the overall passenger trip delays). Second, the metrics do not quantify the magnitude of the delay (only the likelihood) and thus fail to provide the consumer with a useful assessment of the impact of a delay (such as missed connections on next mode of transportation). A new consumer protection metric, expected value of passenger trip delay (EV-PTD), is described; it accounts for (a) canceled flights and (b) both the probability of delay and the magnitude of the delay. The EV-PTD for all 1,030 routes between 35 Operational Evolution Plan airports in 2005 ranged from 11.5 min (best) to 155 min (worst). The average route EV-PTD was 35 min. By treating passenger trip delay as a random variable it can be shown that the transportation process is not a fair game and that passengers and service providers (e.g., airlines, air traffic control, airports) cannot beat the system until the variance is significantly reduced. The implications of these results and the use of the EV-PTD metric by consumers for purchasing tickets and for consumer protection are discussed.

01082877

English

pp 22-27

2007

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309104333

Print

Figures (2) ; References (13) ; Tables (4)

Air travel; Airlines; Airport operations; Arrivals and departures; Consumer protection; Flight delays; Metrics (Quantitative assessment); On time performance; Traffic delays

Connecting flights; Flight cancellations

Aviation; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2007 6:24PM

• Accelerated Practices for Construction of Airfield Concrete Pavement: Lessons Learned from Planning Phase
• Advanced Modeling Capabilities for Airport Performance Assessment and Capacity Management
• Air Traffic Control Complexity and Safety: Framework for Sector Design Based on Controller Interviews of Complexity Factors
• Aircraft-Based Pavement Surface Roughness Assessment
• Analysis of Survey Data on Situation Awareness of Helicopter Pilots: Case of Helicopter Accidents in South Korea
• Assessment of Airport Productivity: Nonparametric Directional Output Distance Function Approach and Its Robustness
• Logit Models for Forecasting Nationwide Intercity Travel Demand in the United States
• Modeling Joint Choice of Airline Itinerary and Fare Product: Implications for Airline Pricing Strategies
• Overview of Air Cargo Terminal Design Aspects
• Passenger Market Equilibrium for Competing Airports in Multiple Airport Region
• Probabilistic Forecasts for Aviation Traffic at FAA’s Commercial Terminals: Suggested Methodology and Example
• Steeper Approach Procedure for Increasing Ultimate Capacity of Closely Spaced Parallel Runways
• Stimulation or Saturation? Perspectives on European Low-Cost Airline Market and Prospects for Growth
• Using Multilateration Data in Probabilistic Analysis of Wake Vortex Hazards for Landing Aircraft