Effect of road traffic congestion on aviation passenger's flight choice

This paper investigates how passengers choose flight times in view of ground traffic congestion. The departure time choice model of aviation passengers is developed by extending Vickrey's bottleneck model. The conditions are determined for the existence of the user equilibrium in the model. Then, the range of the difference between the airfares is established while the number of aviation passengers choosing the same flight time remains unchanged at the user equilibrium. Moreover, the tendency of the total queuing time and the incremental airfare revenue is derived along with the difference between the airfares. The results show that the number of aviation passengers is jointly determined by the flight time and the bottleneck capacity for different schedules. Under the given passenger volume, the total queuing time (traffic congestion) can be reduced or the incremental airfare revenue can be increased by properly adjusting the airfares difference. Two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the principle and its application.