An Airspace Concept Evaluation System Characterization Of National Airspace System Delay

This paper presents an analysis of National Airspace System (NAS) delay. An interacting set of models called the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES) was used to simulate one day of NAS-wide air traffic. A total of 36 simulations were run. They included nine different airport capacity conditions across the NAS and four levels of NAS-wide demand. The analysis of delay results for these 36 simulations shows that delay increases quadratically with increased demand. The delay versus capacity curves have linear trends. However, nonlinearities within these curves expand with increased demand. These nonlinearities suggest that additional factors such as regional concentrations of airports in low capacity conditions due to regional weather do have a significant influence on the results. This analysis is an important first step in exploring and understanding the intricacies of the NAS so that further efforts can be made to improve it.