We present a market-based approach to the Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) problem. The goods in our market are delays and buyers are airline companies; the latter pay money to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to buy away the desired amount of delay on a per flight basis. We give a notion of equilibrium for this market and an LP whose every optimal solution gives an equilibrium allocation of flights to landing slots as well as equilibrium prices for the landing slots. Via a reduction to matching, we show that this equilibrium can be computed combinatorially in strongly polynomial time. Moreover, there is a special set of equilibrium prices, which can be computed easily, that is identical to the VCG solution, and therefore the market is incentive compatible in dominant strategy.
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