Benefit Analysis of Dynamic Weather Route: Statistical Evaluation of En Route Airspace Performance

Convective weather is the leading cause of air traffic delay in the National Airspace System. In the current en-route rerouting process, dispatchers typically use the routes planned 45 minutes before pushback from the gate rendering these routes sometimes over-conservative due to transforming weather conditions. The Dynamic Weather Routes (DWR) tool, which is installed at the American Airlines (AA) Integrated Operations Center in Fort Worth Center since 2012, is an advanced user-support tool designed to automatically find time saving reroutes for flights in en-route airspace. However, there are no studies that identify the cumulative direct and indirect impacts of the DWR tool on the flights ecosystem. The indirect impacts of the DWR tool include the ‘Learning Effect’, where the center controllers learn from the DWR suggested reroutes employed on AA flights and apply these reroutes to trailing non-AA flights and AA flights, which were not rerouted directly by the tool. This study identifies the overall impact and the learning effect of using the DWR tool on the actual airborne time savings by comparing DFW-inbound and DFW-outbound flights performance between 2011 and 2013, especially during convective weather using a fixed effects model. On average, DWR is found to save about 7.5 minutes per flight in a convective weather day for both AA and non-AA flights. The comparison of scale of application of the DWR tool on AA flights and its equivalent manifestation on non-AA flights in the form of average flight-time savings confirms the learning effect of the DWR tool on controllers.