Survival analysis of new intra-European scheduled air services

Abstract

While route planning as a core issue of airline network management has received a lot of attention in academia, the same cannot be said for service closures. This paper analyzes the survival of new intra-European scheduled air services. We estimate a total of four Cox proportional hazards (PH) models with time-dependent covariates to assess the impact of airline, airport, route and service characteristics on survival probabilities, which include a stratified model by business model to estimate separate baseline hazards. The empirical analysis ends in 2019 before the COVID crisis. A key finding is that mainline carriers show a significantly increased likelihood of service discontinuation than low-cost carriers challenging the common notion of low-cost carriers’ footloose strategies.