Integrating Delay-Absorption Capability into Flight Departure Delay Prediction

Abstract

Accurately forecasting flight departure delays is essential for improving operational efficiency and mitigating the cascading disruptions that propagate through tightly coupled aircraft rotations. Traditional machine learning approaches often treat upstream delays as static variables, overlooking the dynamic recovery processes that determine whether a delay is absorbed or transmitted to subsequent legs. This study introduces a two-stage machine learning framework that explicitly models delay-absorption behavior and incorporates it into downstream delay prediction. In Stage I, a CatBoost classifier estimates the probability that a flight successfully absorbs an upstream delay based on operational, temporal, and meteorological features. This probability, termed AbsorbScore, quantifies airport- and flight-specific resilience to delay propagation. In Stage II, an XGBoost classifier integrates AbsorbScore with schedule, weather, and congestion indicators to predict whether a flight will depart more than 15 minutes late. Using U.S. domestic flight and NOAA weather data from Summer 2023, the proposed framework achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, increasing ROC-AUC from 0.865 to 0.898 and enhancing precision to 89.2% in identifying delayed flights. The results demonstrate that modeling delay absorption as an intermediate mechanism significantly improves predictive performance and yields interpretable insights into airport recovery dynamics, offering a practical foundation for data-driven delay management and proactive operational planning.