Aggregate Statistical Models for National Airspace System Performance

With the ever increasing congestion at airports around the world, measuring and modeling the airspace system performance metrics poses one of the most important challenges for any strategic decision support system. The Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines have been striving to improve utilization of the critical resources to improve performance. This thesis develops theoretical models to understand the performance of national airspace system measured in terms of both flight level and passenger level. This thesis will address modeling the flight cancellation probability and flight delays in the National Airspace System for an aggregated time period and use them to predict average passenger delays. It will also showcase avenues for future applications of such theoretical models to improve prediction of the airspace congestion and thereby improve decision making capability in aviation systems.