Downstream impact of flight rerouting

In this paper, we estimate the impacts of post-departure flight rerouting on times of arrival at destination airports. There are mainly two types of post-departure reroutes – opportunistic reroutes (distance-saving reroutes) and reactive reroutes (distance-increasing reroutes). To the best of our knowledge, the downstream impact of rerouting has received little attention in the existing literature; however, the benefit/harm of both kinds of reroutes might be exaggerated if their system impact is not taken into account. Thus, we developed a framework for evaluating the net effect of applying a reroute at the system level by analyzing its impact on arrival times at the destination of the rerouted flight. We focus on reroutes that affect en route flight time by 5 min or more. Adopting a “multiplier” concept that was proposed in previous research and making use of two-year (2013–2014) flight level data at the 34 main airports in the US, we analyze how the en route time change affects cumulative arrival throughput at the destination airport, and the associated time savings or time costs. We find that these impacts of reroutes differ remarkably at different airports, and identify airports where the arrival time impact is highly correlated with the en route time change as well as those for which this correlation is weak. In addition, we compare downstream impacts among different types of reroutes. Finally, we study cases with very high multipliers in detail in order to identify these circumstances under which they occur.