Where PHX departures lose time, and what breaks first as traffic grows

Phoenix Sky Harbor treated as a consulting client, using public BTS, FAA, NOAA and TSA data for 2024 and 2025. By Jake Moore.

Where is time lost, and what is the best fix?

The morning departure bank's taxi queue holds the most recoverable value, about $95.8M a year, with 68% of it in the 7 to 11 AM pushback window.

What degrades first at +15% traffic?

Excess taxi-out degrades first: at +15% traffic its annual minutes rise 23.1% and its delay per flight rises 7.1%, while gate delay grows only with the number of flights.

193,862reporting-carrier departures per year

2.71Mdeparture delay minutes per year

$788.1Myearly cost of the 3 measured stages

95.7%of departures linked to their inbound aircraft

Video

Summary video coming soon

Full walkthrough coming soon

Key charts

Gate delay created at PHX is the largest stage at 1.7M minutes a year; the 3 stages together cost about $788.1M a year.

61% of departure delay is created at PHX; 39% arrives on late inbound aircraft.

Taxi-out queues peak in the morning bank at 9.9 extra minutes per flight around 9:00.

At +15% traffic, excess taxi-out rises 23.1% in annual minutes and +7.1% per flight; gate delay rises only with flight count.

Recommendation

$95.8M a year

Spread departures out of the 7 to 11 AM bank so the taxi queue shrinks. Southwest (33% of the bank's queue), American (33%), the FAA tower and PHX operations would act together. Value at stake: $95.8M a year in the base case, $318.9M in the high case. Holding aircraft at the gate alone saves only fuel and maintenance, about $19.7M a year, because passengers still leave late.

Limitations

Scope starts at the gate. Curb, check-in, security waits and gate occupancy have no public data.
BTS covers reporting carriers only, about 80% of PHX operations counted by the FAA in 2024-2025.
TSA data is passenger counts only and implies nothing about wait times.
Act 2 is a projection with today's runways, gates and procedures, and an even schedule increase by hour.
Dollar inputs come from published A4A and FAA/DOT values; fix costs are not public, so dollars are recoverable value, not ROI.

Links

GitHub repo (link once published)Full report, PDF (link once published)Slide deck (link once published)

Every number on this page is generated by the project scripts from public data.