Trend Analysis of Airline Passenger Trip Delays

The purpose of the Air Transportation System (ATS) is to provide safe and efficient transportation of passengers and cargo. The on -time performance of the ATS is measured by flight -bas ed metrics such as flight delays and flight cancellations . Researchers have shown that flight -based metrics do not accurately reflect the passenger trip experienc e, and especially underestimate the impact s of cancelled flights and missed connections on passenger trip time . This paper describes a segment -based trend analysis in passenger trip time for the years 2004 and 2005. This paper uses the “estimated passenger trip delay (EPTD)” caused by d elayed and cancelled single -segment flights to measure the passenger on -time performance. The EPTD passenger -based metric captures the passenger delays (40M hours) caused by small amount of cancelled flights ( <2%) . The trend analysis indicate s that a small increase in operations ( +0.5%) in conjunction with an increase in cancellations ( +1.5%) and higher load factors ( +5.4 %), resulted in 17.4% incre ase in Estimated Total Passenger Trip Delays in 2005 over 2004 . This result reveals the complex nonlinear relationship between the number of operations, the number of cancellations, load factor and passenger trip delays.