System analysis of flight and passenger trip delays in the National Airspace System (NAS)

The primary objective of the National Airspace System (NAS) is the transportation of passengers and cargo. It is no surprise, therefore, that passenger trip time performance is positively correlated with passenger satisfaction, airfare elasticity, and airline profits. Regulatory consumer information available to airline passengers provides measures of trip performance using only flight data (and not passenger trip data). Previously, researchers, using a small set of proprietary airline data, demonstrated that trip delays experienced by passengers due to missed connections, cancelled flights, and delayed flights are not negligible. Further they showed that flight delay data cannot be used as a proxy for passenger trip delays. This paper describes a comparative statistical analysis between flight delay data and passenger trip delay data for one year's worth of flights on the 1030 single segment routes between the OEP-35 airports. The passenger trip data is derived from publicly available data-bases and accounts for delays experienced by passengers on single segment routes due to cancelled flights as well as delayed flights. The statistical analysis indicates that: (i) the percentage of on-time flights is statistically equivalent to the percentage of on-time passengers, (ii) the average passenger trip delay was 34 minutes in excess of the average flight delay, and (iii) average passenger trip delay for the worst 5% of delayed passengers was 150 minutes in excess of the flight delay. The implications of these results for consumers and consumer protection are discussed.