Summary
This document presents a preliminary analysis of potential departure delay reduction benefits in New York as the result of the use of the Integrated Departure Route Planning (IDRP) tool during convective severe weather avoidance programs (SWAP). The analysis is based on weather impact and air traffic data from operations between May and September 2010 in the New York metroplex region. Two methodologies were employed in the analysis: "flight pool" and "resource pool." In the flight pool methodology, individual flights with excessive taxi times were identified, and opportunities to find potential alternative reroutes using information that IDRP will provide were assessed. In the resource pool methodology, route impact minutes were tallied over several days, based on the judgment of a human analysis, and opportunities to recover capacity lost to route impacts via IDRP-identified reroutes were estimated. The flight pool methodology estimated that approximately 156 hours of delay could be saved through the use of IDRP over a full SWAP season. The resource pool methodology estimated that approximately 15% of capacity lost to convective weather impacts could be recovered via IDRP-based reroutes. It should be noted that the potential benefits are based on several assumptions that are described in detail in the text of the report. The estimation of delay savings due to reroute is also speculative. It is very difficult to ascertain when the assignment of a reroute actually makes use of underutilized capacity and when the reroute simply shifts the problem from one congested resource to another. Further research is needed to develop reliable metrics that can guide the assessment of reroute impacts on overall traffic management performance.