Passenger Trip Delays in the U.S. Airline Transportation System

Abstract—The value of the air transportation system is the transportation of light-weight, high-value cargo, and passengers. Industry and government metrics for the performance of the air transportation focus on the performance of the flights. Previous research has identified the discrepancy between flight performance and passenger trip performance, and has developed algorithms for the estimation of passenger trip performance from publicly available data. This paper describes an analysis of passenger trip delays for 5224 routes between 309 air ports in the U.S. air transportation system for 2007. The average trip delay experienced by passengers was 24.3 minutes for a nationwide total of 247 Million hours. Flights delayed 15 minutes or more contributed 48 % of the total delays, cancelled flights 43%, diverted flights 3%, and flights delayed less than 15 minutes contributed the remaining 6%. Passenger trip delays for oversold flights were negligible. Analysis of passenger trip delays for routes and airports, and the implications of these results are also discussed. Keywords- passenger trip delay; flight delay, airport delay. I