Principal Investigator Cynthia Barnhart
Flight delays continue to be a concern within the US National Aviation System despite slowed growth over the past few years due to the economic downturn. The problem is even greater at a number of key airports, such as those in the New York region, which affect passengers flying to all parts of the Nation. To further complicate the question of delay effects, our study has shown that average passenger delay is, on average, nearly twice of average flight delay, accounting for the effects of missed connections and cancellations. Both flight delays and passenger delays are significantly affected by airline scheduling and networks, which have seen changes in recent years due to airline mergers, market growth and changes in banking structures at congested hubs. The impact of these changes have not, however, been quantified and are not currently well understood. MIT has developed the capability to estimate passenger delays in the NAS given historical flight delay data using the MIT passenger delay model. This model incorporates a discrete choice model for estimating historical passenger itinerary travel, and a greedy re-accommodation heuristic for estimating the resulting passenger delays. The next steps in ongoing research is to extend this work to quantify passenger delays for a number of years and to conduct a longitudinal study identifying the impacts of some significant developments in the US airline industry over recent years, including regulatory changes and airline strategic decisions.