Congestion delays at hub airports

Abstract

A deterministic model was developed to study the effects of inefficient scheduling on flight delays at hub airports. The model bases the delay calculation on published schedule data and on user-defined airport capacities. Data from the Official Airline Guide of May, 1977 and May, 1985 was used for the analysis. Twelve large airports were studied in the hopes of finding a correlation between airport delay due to congestion and hubs. Data for both time periods was analyzed for the twelve airports in order to find historical trends in the growth of hubbing. Among the airports studied, those that were hubs had significantly more delays due to inefficient scheduling than the non-hubs, even for an equivalent number of operations. Also, these relative inefficiencies were shown to exist from hub to hub. Delays at hubs of similar size differed by up to 200 percent.