DS-06 · Where a delay at RIC actually comes from

Airline delays propagate: a late inbound aircraft makes the next departure late. Using tail numbers, can you quantify how much of a departure delay at Richmond International is inherited rather than locally caused?

BTS Marketing Carrier On-Time Performance (https://www.transtats.bts.gov/ONTIME/). NOAA weather for the same days (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-daily).

Cancelled flights are not delays and must not be treated as very large ones. Tail-number chaining requires careful same-day ordering and breaks across midnight. Delay cause codes are self-reported by carriers and are not ground truth. RIC is a small airport — sample sizes per carrier per month get thin fast.

A quantified decomposition of departure delay into inherited versus originated, with the chaining logic documented and validated on a sample by hand, and a statement of which carriers had enough flights to support a conclusion.

CT: recognizing the self-reported cause codes are a claim, not a fact. CR: reconstructing aircraft rotations from flat records. CO: hand-validating a peer's chains. CM: an explanation a frequent flyer would find genuinely useful. CZ: who bears the cost of delay, and how compensation rules treat "weather" versus "carrier."

An operations analyst, airline or airport employee, or logistics professional reviews chaining at Checkpoint 1 and the decomposition at Checkpoint 2. School-supervised.

R1: scoped to RIC and a defined period. R2: cancellations handled explicitly. R3: a baseline attributing all delay locally. R4: hand-validation of the chain logic on real rows. R5: useful to a traveler. R6: treats carrier-reported causes skeptically.

(a) Cancellations are coded as 999-minute delays and one storm week dominates every result. (b) The student trusts the cause codes, reports that weather causes most delay, and has reported what carriers chose to file.