4804 words, including abstract) Abstract. In the United States, most airports do not place any limitations on airline schedules. At a few major airports, the current scheduling restrictions (mostly administrative measures) have not been sufficiently strict to avoid consistent delays and have raised debates about both the efficiency and the fairness of the allocations. With a forecast 1.1 billion yearly air travelers within the U.S. by 2015, airport expansion and technology enhancement alone are

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... not enough to cope with the competition-driven scheduling practices of the airline industry. The policy legacy needs to change to be consistent with airport capacities. Our research studies how flight schedules might change if airlines had to restrict their schedules to be consistent with runway capacity. To obtain these schedules, we take a novel modeling approach. We model a profit-seeking, single benevolent airline, and develop an airline economic model to simulate its scheduling decisions. This airline is benevolent in the sense that it considers historic pricing at LaGuardia and the associated price-elasticity and attempts to service this population while simultaneously remaining profitable. We explicitly incorporate the relationship between supply and demand through price elasticity, which is estimated by extensive data mining of publicly available databases. Our case study demonstrates that at Instrument Meterological Conditions 1 (IMC) runway rates, the market can find profitable flight schedules that reduce substantially the average flight delay while accommodating the current passenger demand at prices consistent with the current competitive market. The IMC rate provides a predictable on-time performance for the identified schedules in all weather conditions. In addition, the reduction of flights through consolidation of low load-factor flights and through aircraft up-gauging alleviate much of the current traffic pressure on high-demand airports. (276 words)