Too Busy to Depeak: Quantifying the Persistence of Peaked Schedules at European Airports

Josu Blanco1, José J. Ramasco1 and Massimiliano Zanin1
1 Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), 07122 Palma, Spain.

(June 2026)

The temporal organisation of airline schedules is shaped by the superposition of individual carrier decisions. Banked schedules concentrate arrivals and departures in waves, supporting transfer connectivity by reducing passenger connection times, while also increasing concurrent demand on airport and airspace resources. In this work, we study this temporal concentration primarily from the airport-level perspective, complemented by a preliminary decomposition by leading airlines. We introduce two complementary indicators of schedule peakiness: the Shannon entropy of the hourly traffic profile and the number of busy hours defined through airport-specific thresholds. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a reference disruption, we compare pre- and post-pandemic schedules across major European airports at comparable traffic levels. Results show substantial airport-level heterogeneity: Rome Fiumicino and Dublin display flatter post-pandemic aggregate schedules, whereas airports such as London Heathrow, Amsterdam Schiphol and Zurich show persistent or reinforced concentration. The airline-level decomposition suggests that these airport-wide changes reflect carrier-specific shifts in schedule organisation. Overall, we find no evidence of a general post-pandemic depeaking of European airport schedules.

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