The magnitude of detours faced by commercial flights: A global assessment

Abstract

Scholars and experts in transportation, economics, geography and environmental studies have largely assumed the distance flown by commercial planes represents the shortest route (also known as the great-circle or orthodromic route). However, in the real world, planes follow longer itineraries for various reasons. The magnitude of these detours is assessed through a large, one-week sample of actual flight traces obtained from Flightradar, which we compare with great-circle distances (n=393,360). The results suggest that the average lengthening is 7.6 %, although under conservative hypotheses and with high standard deviation. The shortest flights are proportionally more affected. They also contribute more to the global amount of extra kilometres. The geography of detours by departure airport is the consequence of a wide range of factors. As a result, considering the use of great-circle distances to feed spatial interaction models, emission (or fuel burnt) assessments or airline rankings can lead to significantly skewed outcomes. In addition, detours imposed on certain airlines for geopolitical reasons increase costs, emissions and time aboard, and could be anticompetitive.

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“…As for the negative impacts, circles could thus be replaced with corridors based on actual three-dimensional pathways followed by airplanes on takeoffs and landings. Both commercial and publicly available flight traces have already been used (Li, Suh, and Ryerson 2018;Dobruszkes and Peeters 2019). Coverage in developing countries is currently partial, however.…”

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“…It not only treats all flights originating from a single country in the same manner, regardless of the (unknown) origin city or region (for example, no distinction is made between New York and Los Angeles in the United States), it is also based on the assumption that air travel is always choosing the shortest path (greatcircle distance). Dobruszkes and Peeters (2019) show that the majority of commercial flights actually take longer routes, which on average adds 7.5% of distance. Therefore, we have corrected all 'shortest distances' between origins and destinations by means of the distance class-based coefficients as provided by Dobruszkes and Peeters (2019).…”

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“…Table 3 provides examples of the raw news data analyzed for content and the resulting codes for types of competitive moves. Connecting flights become impractical if the value exceeds 40% (Danesi, 2006;Goedeking, 2010;Burghouwt & Redondi, 2013;Dobruszkes & Peeters, 2019).To compare the connecting flights offered for the relevant flight route with direct flights, we used the Great Circle Distance website. Figure 3 displays the analyses made for the example on the map.…”