Paper 153 -- Delay Impacts onto Turnaround Performance

During 2007, 19% of all European flights were more than 15 min late. One contributor to this delay is the insufficient ground operation performance inducing excessive process durations. Whenever these processes are part of the critical Turnaround (TA) path, such as de-boarding, fuelling, cleaning, catering and boarding, the effects immediately propagate an accumulating delay through the ATM network. Recent studies have investigated into the effects of technical aircraft deficiencies onto TA reliability, and could show that significant potential is given for improvement. Field analyses at German airlines showed that pre-set quality standards for punctuality can actually not be met. This paper extends that analysis by considering the individual inbound delay measured at the gate, revealing the correlation between TA process duration and stability versus a given delay with an analytical model. The concept of dynamically scheduling buffer times to compensate for potential delays into the ground time of aircraft turnaround operations is introduced into our model. It can be shown that dynamic buffering may overcome deficiencies of the currently applied buffer strategies for ground processes. The paper closes with a strategy on how to scale gate time to cope with demanding punctuality requirements from the customer’s side. With regards to Airport CDM concepts, the dependencies found may be used in decision support tools to trigger ground handling resource (personnel and tools) planner and motivate for strategies specifically for Ground Handling Companies.