An assessment of flight delay caused by en route weather

Convective weather in the National Airspace System (NAS) impedes air traffic, by blocking air routes and creating non-standard flows which are less familiar to air traffic controllers. Part of a study of the benefits of tactical rerouting around convective weather involves characterizing weather-induced delay in en route airspace. Relying on an algorithm which detects course-deviations and holding patterns, a search routine was developed to associate these maneuvers with weather-impacted sector locations and times. Both within-sector and upstream-of-sector delays were discovered. The search routine uses coarse geographic filtering for efficiency in the processing of large sets of operational data. As a validation of the detected association between flight delay and weather, statistical tests were performed against an empirically-derived null hypothesis distribution.