Block time reliability and scheduled block time setting

• We model the airlines’ scheduled block time (SBT) setting mechanism.
• We incorporate impact of block time reliability on SBT and system performance.
• Inner right tail of the block time distribution more strongly affects SBT than outer.
• Changes in block time distribution affect SBTs, delay, and on-time performance.

While in ground transportation the concept of reliability has been extensively studied, there is little literature in air transportation. Scheduled block time (SBT) setting is a crucial part in airlines’ scheduling. Interviews with an airline and relevant work in ground transportation have shown that SBT and the historical block time distribution, reflecting block time reliability, have a close relationship. This paper investigates how the change in actual block time distribution will affect SBT and system performance. Firstly this relationship is studied with empirical data and multiple regression models. The distribution of the historical block time for a flight is depicted by the difference between every 10th percentiles. We found that gate delay plays a minor role in setting SBT and that SBTs have decreasing sensitivity to historical flight times toward the right tail of the distribution. To specifically link SBT setting with the flight’s on-time performance, a SBT adjustment model is further developed. Poor on-time performance leads to increased SBT in the next year. With the behavior model results showing that both the median block time and the “inner right tail” of the distribution affect SBT setting, an impact study is conducted to validate these impacts with historical data. The impact of historical block time distribution on SBT is validated with real data in year 2006–2008 and 2009–2011. Furthermore, by studying the flight performance difference based on different changes in SBT, we conclude that ignoring the impact on SBT changes when considering potential benefits of improved block time distribution could lead to inaccurate results.