Fuel Consumption and Operational Performance

Reducing fuel consumption is a major goal for the aviation community due to environmental concern and fuel price uncertainty. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently developing and implementing Air Traffic Management (ATM) technologies to ensure reliable operational performance that is robust to delays caused by congestion and weather. These technologies will reduce planned and unexpected airborne delays; as such they will reduce the airline practice of schedule padding, or contingency planning for excess fuel and time consumption on a give route, as well as airborne and departure delay. In this study, we seek to quantify the fuel consumption impact of these technologies on the three operational performance measures: schedule padding, airborne delay, and departure delay. We do so by modeling airline fuel consumption using econometric techniques to isolate the contribution of operational performance. We use fuel consumption reported by a major US-based airline to capture revealed, and not simulated, airspace inefficiencies. For two aircraft types we find that a minute spent in airborne delay burns 50-60 lbs of fuel, compared with 4.5-12 lbs for a minute of schedule padding and 2.3-4.6 lbs for a minute of departure delay. We find additionally that fixed fuel consumed due to congested and complicated airport terminal areas can be up to 16 percent greater. When considering specific origin-destination pairs, we find the elimination of the three delay metrics due to technology could reduce airborne fuel consumption up to ten percent per operation.