Assessing Departure Efficiency at U.S. Airports: a Comparison of Methods

摘要

This paper presents two flight time-based approaches for assessing departure efficiency at an airport. The first approach, the Departure Flow Efficiency (DFE) metric, evaluates observed departure transit time against unimpeded departure transit time for flights. The DFE scores, simple to compute, can be used for trend analysis and for next-day performance reporting of airport operations. The second approach, a regression-based Departure Transit Time Model (DTTM), models expected departure transit time for flights given operational conditions and flight characteristics. The DTTM approach can control for the impact of known factors influencing departure transit times and enable identification of anomalous operations, making it suitable for a predictive analysis of expected departure efficiency. Based on an analysis for Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD) flight departures, the DFE and the DTTM approaches showed comparable results in identifying low departure efficiency days over a period of time.