Flight Time and Flight Traffic Before, During, and After the Pandemic: What Has Changed?

This paper develops a model for quantifying the relationship between flight volume and its operational performance at the macro level and investigating whether there are any changes before, during, and after the pandemic. Inspired by the market basket concept from economics, we first calculate macro-level effective flight time (EFT) for the U.S. domestic flight market by constructing a flight basket. Semi-log-linear models are developed to formulate the relationship between the total number of flights and macro-level EFT and its components. The estimation results indicate that the total number of flights has a positive and significant impact on EFT and its components, with 29.244 min longer for the weighted EFT for the analysis period compared with a zero-traffic scenario. Further investigations into the post-pandemic period verify the performance of the model and indicate that deteriorating operational performance in this period, especially with regard to gate delay and taxi-in time, is not only a result of the recovery of the flight market.