Statistical Comparison of Passenger Trip Delay and Flight Delay Metrics

The primary objective of the National Airspace System (NAS) is the transportation of passengers and cargo. Since passenger trip time performance is positively correlated with passenger satisfaction, airfare elasticity, and airline profits, it follows that the National Air Space (NAS) performance evaluation, modernization, and consumer protection should be based on passenger trip performance. Publicly available regulatory measures of NAS performance, however, are based on flight data and not passenger trip data. Researchers, using a small set of proprietary airline data, have demonstrated that trip delays experienced by passengers due to missed connections, cancelled flights, and delayed flights are not negligible. Further this research demonstrated that flight delay data is a poor proxy for measuring passenger trip delays. This paper describes a comparative statistical analysis between flight delay data and estimated 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 on-time passengers is equal to the percentage of on-time flights plus the percentage of cancelled flights, (ii) the average passenger trip delay is 34 minutes in excess of the average flight delay, and (iii) average passenger trip delay for the worst 5% of delayed passengers is 150 minutes in excess of the flight delay. The implications of these results for consumers, industry performance measures, and Federal Aviation Administration modernization efforts are discussed. Lance Sherry, Danyi Wang, Ning Xu, Melanie Larson 3