The Distribution Function of Airport Taxi‐Out Times and Selected Applications

Abstract

Except in adverse weather conditions, congestion at large airport hubs appears to be predictable. This paper attempts to translate this predictability into a distribution of taxi-out times, a key component of airport congestion. When scheduled flights are chosen to define the dataset, taxi-out times follow a uniform distribution. This is not only the simplest distribution that inferences can be based on, but also a distribution that can be estimated by simple linear regression leading to very accurate forecasts. But above all, it is an invertible distribution function that can help solve a large class of stochastic optimization problems.