Airport Dominance, Route Network Design and Flight Delays

In this paper, we use detailed information of weather conditions, Eurocontrol regulations and strikes to examine the main drivers of flight delays in six Spanish airports in the period 2017–2018. We show that external shocks are an important driver of delays for low-cost and dominant airlines at large airports. Dominant airlines have better on-time performance when they operate hub-and-spoke networks, although this can be partially explained by their more frequent use of schedule padding. Finally, we find no direct evidence that competition at route level affects delays, although padding is more frequent when route competition is weak.