Projecting Constrained Flight Schedules Based On Rules Derived from an Empirical Study

The National Airspace System (NAS) faces growing air travel demand which has already approached or exceeded operational capacities at several major airports. To reflect these capacity constraints, this paper presents a study to develop flight constraining rules based on historical traffic data at four previously slot-controlled airports: ORD, LGA, JFK, and EWR. Our analysis focuses exclusively on metrics based on service quality (measured by delays) and congestion (measured by capacity utilization ratios). After examining the selected metrics at the four airports, we derive the trigger conditions and implementation rules for capacity constraints. A similar set of flight constraining rules are also derived, based on the daily traffic constraint distributions, that can be applied to computer models to project feasible flight schedules in the future.