Flight Delays, Operational Responses, and Their Environmental Cost: Evidence from European Skies

This paper investigates the operational and environmental consequences of flight delays in the European airline industry. Using detailed 2023 data on aircraft rotations, we develop three complementary empirical models. The first quantifies within-flight mitigation, capturing how airlines strategically absorb departure delays through en-route and destination-side adjustments. The second examines delay propagation across consecutive flights, shedding light on the effectiveness of turnaround buffers and network-level externalities. The third links airborne delays to fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, providing a quantitative estimate of the environmental costs of tactical recovery strategies. Our findings show that within-flight mitigation absorbs roughly 5% of departure delays, propagation across rotations is moderate, and each additional airborne minute increases fuel burn by roughly 22 kg and CO2 emissions by 71 kg. From a policy and management perspective, these results underscore the importance of realistic scheduling, buffer allocation, and coordination between airlines and air traffic control to improve punctuality and reduce environmental impacts, highlighting trade-offs central to airline operational and industrial strategy.