Predicting Fuel Consumption and Flight Delays for Low-Cost Airlines

Abstract

Low-cost airlines (LCAs) represent a new category of airlines that provides low-fare flights. The rise and growth of LCAs has intensified the price competition among airlines, and LCAs require continuous efforts to reduce their operating costs to lower flight prices; however, LCA passengers still demand high-quality services. A common measure of airline service quality is on-time departure performance. Because LCAs apply efficient aircraft utilization and the time between flights is likely to be small, additional effort is required to avoid flight delays and improve their service quality. In this paper, we apply state-of-the-art predictive modeling approaches to real airline datasets and investigate the feasibility of machine learning methods for cost reduction and service quality improvement in LCAs. We address two prediction problems: fuel consumption prediction and flight delay prediction. We train predictive models using flight and passenger information, and our experiment results show that our regression model predicts the amount of fuel consumption more accurately than flight dispatchers, and our binary classifier achieves an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.75 for predicting a delay of a specific flight route.