Strategic Management of Airline Operations: A Comprehensive Analysis of Flight Delay Causes and Mitigation Strategies

Travelers nowadays are often informed of delays, which lowers consumer satisfaction. The delays and other variables cost both tangible and intangible. Thus, airlines and airports must foresee and mitigate flight delays to improve operational efficiency and perhaps apply customer-centric solutions to mitigate their negative effects. Flight delays influence operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial health in the aviation industry, a vital part of global transportation networks. The numerous causes of flight delays in strategic airline operation management are extensively reviewed in this research. It covers external and internal factors including weather, air traffic control, mechanical issues, and administrative initiatives. The study integrates logistics, human resources, and customer service management to understand airline delays’ complexity. This study uses Data Mining to anticipate Hartsfield-Jackson international airport arrival delays by identifying the most important characteristics. The study uses the Knowledge Discovery Database (KDD) process, including data gathering, sampling methods (SMOTE and Under Sampling), data division into training and test sets, data preprocessing (addressing missing values and outliers), and data transformation. Define and train Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Multilayer Perceptrons, then evaluate model performance using various metrics. After experimenting, the best model uses departure variables, the Multilayer Perceptron algorithm, SMOTE for data balancing, outlier removal, and Gain Ratio-based selection of ten key variables.