Identification of possible reasons that affect departure flight punctuality

Abstract

A flight is said to be delayed when an airline flight takes off and/or lands later than its scheduled time. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) considers a flight to be delayed when it is 15 minutes later than its scheduled time. Punctuality is one of the key performance indicators in the airline industry and an important service differentiator especially for valuable high-yield customers. In addition, improved on-time performance can help achieve significant cost savings. This is a critical issue in the air transportation industry since it generates lot of problems to the operation and the inconvenience for the passengers. Once a delay is occurred it is totally affected to the entire airline network and it will totally effect to the passengers. Flight delays are an inconvenience to passengers. A delayed flight can be costly to passengers by making them late to their personal scheduled events. A passenger who is delayed on a multi-plane trip could miss a connecting flight. Anger and frustration can occur in delayed passengers. This publishes a postgraduate thesis carried out under the topic “Identification of possible reasons that affect departure flight punctuality” and this is carried out as a case study on the National Carrier of Sri Lanka. This mainly focuses on identification of departure flight delays, identifying critical delay types and finding their reasons and finally identifying areas to develop policies and regulations which can be optimize the departure flight punctuality. The findings of the preliminary analysis represents that out of average total departures per day there are 6% of Technical delays, 9% of Unavoidable delays, and 8% of Airport delays and 5% of Air Traffic Control delays. The average delay times per departure flight are 1.22 hrs if Technical delays, 0.34hrs if Unavoidable delays, 0.16hrs if Airport delays and 0.10hrs if Air Traffic Control delays. During the secondary data analysis, some areas were identified as the areas that can be regularized using new policy and regulations or change and develop existing policy and regulations to increase the departure flight punctuality. Some of them are new policy or policy development on A/C rotation, regular and periodic maintenance that can reduce technical errors and failures, scheduled maintenance that will help to manage operation time. Further it is identified that unscheduled maintenance will increase the delay, internal QC and QA on safety and security is a must, policy on recruit maintenance professionals will help to manage emergencies, additional maintenance will reduce engine start up time delays, increasing maintenance will avoid equipment failures, new policy or policy development on intoxicated passengers will reduces delays, new policy on intoxicated passengers will reduces delays, internal organizational policy and regulations can mitigate late reporting and new policy for transfer passenger and baggage timings. Under this study, only the delay data were considered to identify the areas that reduces the departure flight punctuality and any culture, society and the environment of the country were not taken into account. But the factors such as economic, social, environmental and political situation of the country, management changes, joint agreements, code share agreements, aircraft fleet changes, and new governmental policy and regulations also should be considered for the development and the implementation of new policy statements regarding the flight departure delays.