Aircraft Routing Plan During Irregular Airline Flight Operations

Aircraft Recovery During Commercial Airlines Irregular Operations Commercial irregular operations cost the airline industry 8% of lost revenue or $60 billion annually. Direct and indirect sectors of the industry amount to greater than 5% of the GDP of the United States, contributing $1.8 trillion in total economic activity and supporting eleven million jobs (Federal Aviation Administration, 2020e). According to the Department of Transportation (DOT), 24% of U.S. flights have delays, and 3.2% have cancellations in the first six months of air travel for 2022. The airline industry represents a high-cost, high-revenue, and low-profit margin business. Reducing or eliminating a small percentage of irregular operations can offset tight airline business margins. Airline schedules are built by planners months in advance in planning for the most efficient optimized allocation of resources to produce supply to meet the demand for various flight segments. One disruption can create numerous schedule changes to the preplanned operation caused by a single external/internal event. The OCC uses a combination of flight delays, empty aircraft ferrying, and cancellation of flights to repair the disruptive schedule. Ferrying an empty aircraft creates no profit for the airline but canceling a flight segment incurs a loss of customer goodwill and aircraft overnighting at the wrong airport. Minor changes in the input to an optimization-based support system can translate into entirely different solutions creating more significant issues locally or throughout an airline flight system. The disruption begins the recovery period and ends when the airline returns to its original schedule and operations. This research introduces a framework for analyzing open-sourced data to solve a small part of irregular operations focusing on aircraft recovery during commercial airline IROPs. There are currently two distinct types of airline hubs reviewed. A primary hub and spoke operations and airlines with point-to-point services. We developed a methodology for quantitative analysis of the data of several past irregular operations. The process allows for aircraft swapping using optimization aircraft reallocation assignments to decrease the number of late departures from the hub to the outer spokes of the operation. The methodology then enables the aircraft to be redirected to its original schedule to ensure it is in place for the following day’s schedule. Ensuring the aircraft is at the scheduled overnight location allows planned maintenance without causing further issues to the flight schedule and allows normal schedule operations. A point-to-point airline operation with focus cities instead of a hub and spoke operation is then analyzed using the same analysis to decrease the number of late departures. By analyzing past disruption data and solving the aircraft recovery program, late departures will decrease to meet the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) criteria of less than or equal to 15 minutes for on-time departures. This study’s results can help Operation Control Centers prioritize aircraft recovery. Prioritizing aircraft reallocation will decrease late departures, ensure aircraft are in the scheduled overnight locations for required maintenance at the hub and spoke operations, and help prepare the airline to resume the next day's scheduled departures.

Author

• Swain, Robert Raymond

Language

• en

Keyword

• Airline Irregular Operations

Date created

• 2023

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Engineering Management

Degree

• D.Engr.

Advisor

• Campos-Nanez, Enrique

Committee Member(s)

• Etemadi, Amir
• Kamp, John

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/ff3656288