Good Days, Bad Days, and Next Days: Flight Operations and Passenger Outcomes in the Age of Disruptions

Recent events have highlighted the extreme variability of the operational performance of aviation systems. First, COVID afforded us an opportunity to observe operational performance under extremely low levels of traffic. In short, this public health crisis also yielded a spate of “good days” from the standpoint of aviation system operations. Meanwhile, a succession of disruptions including unanticipated convective weather, snow events, hurricanes, and information technology outages has led to increasing numbers of “bad days” characterized by long delays, cancellations, and diversions. One result of bad days is a high incidence of “broken” passenger itineraries both from cancelled flights and misconnections, which is most dramatically manifested when passengers are unable to complete their trips on the planned day of travel, cased referred to here as “next days.” In this talk, I will overview recent research on “good days,” “bad days,” and “next days” in the US aviation system. Highlighted results include estimates of operational performance of a “single plane in the sky” aviation system, the classification of operational days in order to identify days that are severely disrupted, and models relating passenger outcomes, especially next-day arrivals, to flight operational performance.

Prof. Mark Hansen is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from Yale with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Philosophy in 1980, and has a PhD in Engineering Science and a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, Prof. Hansen worked as a physicist at the Environmental Protection Agency. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1988, he has led transportation research projects in urban transportation planning, air transport systems modeling, air traffic flow management, aviation systems performance analysis, aviation safety, aviation environmental analysis, and air transport economics. He has taught graduate and undergraduate transportation courses in economics, systems analysis, planning, probability and statistics, and air transportation. Prof. Hansen is the Berkeley co-director of the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, a multi-university consortium sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration, and Principal Investigator for the Center for Air Transport Resilience, a NASA-sponsored University Leadership Initiative. He is former Chair of Transportation Research Board Committee AV-060, Airport and Airspace Capacity and Delay. He has served as Associate Editor of Operations Research, Transportation Research E, and Journal of Air Transportation. Prof. Hansen has been recognised with the Francis X. McKelvey Award for his outstanding work in relation to the aviation industry from the Transportation Research Board and is a Fellow of Air Transportation Research Society.