What Is The Impact Of Flight Delays?

Flight delays not only cause inconvenience to passengers, but also cost the carriers billions of dollars. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) considers a flight to be delayed when it is 15 minutes later than its scheduled time, while a cancellation occurs when the airline does not operate the flight at all for a certain reason. Carriers attribute flight delays to several causes such as bad weather conditions, airport congestion, airspace congestion, and use of smaller aircraft by airlines. These delays and cancellations tarnish the airlines’ reputation, often resulting in loss of demand by passengers. Further, it may have an indirect impact as the inefficiency of the air transportation system calls for a larger number of employees and ground staff, increasing the cost of doing business.

Why Delays?

Although some delays are because of congestion and weather conditions, others are due to mechanical problems, difficulties while boarding passengers, and simply the airline’s inability to handle the demand, given its capacity.

Consequently, a relation can be drawn between demand, capacity, and flight delays. Given an airline’s capacity, if the current demand in its system is “D1″ and it suffers from “delay1” we can conclude that without additional investment in capacity, the airline’s delays under increased demand, “D2” would increase to “delay2.” Please refer to the diagram below to pictorially understand the relations between capacity, demand, and flight delays.

What Are The Costs Associated With Delays?

Delays and cancellations affect both passengers and air carriers. By resulting in increased travel time and increased expenses on food and lodging, they cause stress among passengers. Further, they disrupt the purpose of air travel — rapid, affordable and safe — and make the passengers distrust airlines. On the other hand, airlines suffer from extra crew costs, costs associated with accommodating disrupted passengers, and aircraft re-positioning, as airline fleet and crew schedules are largely based on the scheduled times.

In addition to the costs suffered by passengers and airlines, there may be an indirect circular impact on the rest of the economy. As airline costs increase, they charge passengers a higher fare, affecting leisure travels and those industries which rely on air transportation for their business. This indirect impact then results in spillover on the rest of the economy, snowballing the already high costs of airlines.

How To Avoid Delays?

Much is said about bad weather conditions resulting in delays. However, if we look at the statistics compiled by the bureau of Transport Statistic, it becomes obvious that extreme weather causes only a 5% delay of the total delay minutes.

The biggest contributors to delay have consistently been late arrival of aircraft and air carrier delay. While it may not be possible or economical to eradicate all delays, steps can be taken to reduce incidents of delays. In the light of the above statistics, there is an urgent need for substantial investments to modernize and expand the aviation infrastructure, so that it can accommodate anticipated growth without large increases in delay. Further, reward and recognition programs to reward the best performers in terms of on-time arrival and reducing incentives to over scheduling flights may help with the problem of delays.

Recent Cancellation/Delay Episodes At Delta

Due to power outage in Atlanta, Delta Air Lines’ global operations were severely impacted. This resulted in large-scale cancellations and a waiver for customers traveling from 8-12 August, 2016. While the source of the problem remained unclear, it was attributed to computer failure from the power outage in Atlanta. After the cancellation of more than 1,600 flights over two days, Delta resumed normal operations. Such episodes, if in high frequency, may adversely impact the airline’s profitability, and in the long term topline, by tarnishing its reputation.

*Year to date performance of airlines on the basis of on time arrival.

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