Identification of Weather Influences on Flight Punctuality Using Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

One of the top long-term threats to airport resilience is extreme climate-induced conditions, which negatively affect the airport and flight operations. Recent examples, including hurricanes, storms, extreme temperatures (cold/hot), and heavy rains, have damaged airport facilities, interrupted air traffic, and caused higher operational costs. With the development of civil aviation and the pre-COVID-19 surging demand for flights, the passengers’ complaints of flight delay increased, according to FoxBusiness. This study aims to discover the weather factors affecting flight punctuality and determine a high-dimensional scale of consequences stemming from weather conditions and flight operational aspects. Machine learning has been developed in correlation with the weather and statistical data for operations at Birmingham Airport as a case study. The cross-correlated datasets have been kindly provided by Birmingham Airport and the Meteorological Office. The scope and emphasis of this study is placed on the machine learning application to practical flight punctuality prediction in relation to climate conditions. Random forest, artificial neural network, support vector machine, and linear regression are used to develop predictive models. Grid-search and cross-validation are used to select the best parameters. The model can grasp the trend of flight punctuality rates well where R2 is 0.80 and the root mean square error (RMSE) is less than 15% using the model developed by random forest technique. The insights derived from this study will help Airport Authorities and the Insurance industry in predicting the scale of consequences in order to promptly enact and enable adaptative airport climate resilience plans, including air traffic rescheduling, financial resilience to climate variances and extreme weather conditions.