Interaction of Airspace Partitions and Traffic Flow Management Delay with Weather

The interaction of partitioning the airspace and delaying flights in the presence of convective weather is explored to study how re-partitioning the airspace can help reduce congestion and delay. Three approaches with varying complexities are employed to compute the ground delays.In the first approach, an airspace partition of 335 high-altitude sectors that is based on clear weather day traffic is used. Routes are then created to avoid regions of convective weather. With traffic flow management, this approach establishes the baseline with per-flight delay of 8.4 minutes. In the second approach, traffic flow management is used to select routes and assign departure delays such that only the airport capacity constraints are met. This results in 6.7 minutes of average departure delay. The airspace is then partitioned with a specific capacity. It is shown that airspace-capacity-induced delay can be reduced to zero ata cost of 20percent more sectors for the examined scenario.