Quantifying Delay Reduction Benefits for Aviation Convective Weather Decision Support Systems*

Benefits quantification and NAS performance assessment have become very important topics for the aviation weather community. In an era of significant federal government and airline budget austerity for civil aviation investments, it is essential to quantitatively demonstrate delay reduction benefits of improved weather decision support systems. Major FAA initiatives stress the importance of quantitative system performance metrics that are related to aviation weather. For example, the new FAA Air Traffic Organization (ATO) and the FAA Flight Plan 2004-08 both have quantitative performance metrics that are closely related to reducing convective weather delays. The Flight Plan metrics include: “Improving the percentage of all flights arriving within 15 minutes of schedule at the 35 OEP airports by 7%, as measured from the FY2000-02 baseline, through FY08,” and “Maintaining average en route travel times among the eight major metropolitan areas.” The ATO metrics include the percentage of on time gate arrivals and the fraction of departures that are delayed greater than 40 minutes. However, these metrics currently do not account for the differences in convective weather severity and changes in the NAS. The dramatic increase in convective season delays in 2004 (Figure 1) due to a combination of severe weather, increases in overall demand, and specific airport issues has