Finding
The frozen shortlist captures 43.38% of eligible positive peer excess in the 2026 diagnostic period, compared with 33.34% for the raw-burden baseline. The 10.04-point difference measures how the shortlist concentrates an accounting benchmark. It is not a reduction in delay minutes.
Why it matters
Use the shortlist to request operational evidence at the selected carrier-airport sites. Comparable schedules, aircraft, staffing and maintenance data are needed before proposing and evaluating a pilot.
Who could use this
An airline operations team with ten investigation slots and a limit of two sites per airport.
Data and scope
60,093 official BTS carrier-airport-month source rows from January 2024 to August 2026. The pipeline quarantines 148 rows and retains 35,270 peer-eligible monthly rows.
How the analysis works
Leave-one-out airport/month benchmarking separates unusual carrier delay from raw size. Discovery priorities are frozen on January–August 2024, checked in 2025 and diagnosed in 2026. Two-month blocks examine retrospective stability.
Limits of the evidence
The data omit flight-level schedule, fleet and route comparability, and use a revised snapshot. No causal intervention effect, attainable saving or point-in-time backtest is established.