Mitigation of airspace congestion impact on airline networks

In recent years European airspace has become increasingly congested and airlines can now observe that en-route capacity constraints are the fastest growing source of flight delays. In 2010 this source of delay accounted for 19% of all flight delays in Europe and has been increasing with an average yearly rate of 17% from 2005 to 2010. This paper suggests and evaluates an approach to how disruption management can be combined with flight planning in order to create more proactive handling of the kind of disruptions, which are caused by congested airspace. The approach is evaluated using data from a medium size European carrier and estimates a lower bound saving of several million USD.