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Introduction
The fuel cost is one of the biggest concerns in the air transport sector. The fuel bill is considered as the major section for airlines operating costs; because of this, airline operators aim to handle this issue with great care (Rao, 1999; Adams, 1997; Cavcar and Cavcar, 2004; David, 2009; Singh and Sharma, 2015; Baumann and Klingauf, 2019). According to IATA, this section is expected to be about $182bn in 2020 (accounting for around 21.1% of operating costs at an average price of about $63 per barrel Brent. IATA (2019). Airlines have improved fuel efficiency by 14% in the past decade, and this percentage will continue to improve by implementing new technology and enhanced operations (Spencer, 2011). The improvements made by airliners operation departments focus on wisely managing the fuel consumption of the flights and the usage of the recommended techniques provided by the manufacturer (Airbus 3, 2004). The costs are directly related to not only the amount of fuel consumed but also the time of the operation where the time is also a major parameter in the cost analysis (Airbus 2, 2004). In general, the cost of the fuel is directly associated with the direct operating costs (DOC), which can be defined as all expenses associated with operating the airplane. It can be easily calculated based on fuel prices in the site of the operation. On the other hand, there are indirect operating costs (IOC), which include the other costs of operations rather than the fuel costs. Those are not considered as the operating costs of the aircraft itself; rather, they are classified in two different sections which are ground operating costs and system operating costs, such as, ground and station expenses – e.g. ground crew; and transport; handling fees, passenger services – e.g. flight crew salaries (could be DOC), and passenger insurance, ticketing, sales, advertisement and administrative duties (Belobaba et al., 2016; Eller and Moreira, 2014).
For an airline, the decision of which choice is better to be adopted (flying faster to save time or slower to save fuel) is a direct function of the cost index (CI), which is considered as a base of all economic performance calculations (EUROCONTROL, 2012).
The meet-time of arrival (the required time of arrival) is...