Estimation of Flight Delay Costs for U.S. Domestic Air Passengers.

Evaluating the economic value of the flight delays has always been a keeninterest among research groups as well as federal agencies such as the USDepartment of Transportation (DOT) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). However, due to the complexity as well as incompleteness of data sets, estimating flight delay costs is considered as a challenging task in practice. In this paper, the authors present a method for estimating domesticair passengers delay cost incurred by flight delays in the US airports. Aunique feature of the method presented in this paper is that the costs incurred by flight delays relative to the original flight schedules are imposed at passengers final destination airports. The underlying assumption ofthis idea is that the opportunity costs (incurred from compromising business opportunities or personal affairs due to the delayed flights) happen at the destination airports not at the transfer airports. In order to reflect the variability of flight delays, both average and 95th percentile flight delays are calculated at each airport and applied to estimate corresponding delay costs. In 2007, total domestic passenger delay cost is estimated to be $5.2 billion and $ 8.7 billion based on average and 95th percentile gate-arrival delays, respectively. Assumptions, data sets, and results from this study are summarized and compared to those from previous studies.