To Jump or not to Jump? This is the Queue

Congestion at airports leads to flight delays and, therefore, to costly implications for airlines. As departure queues for takeoff at airports, we observe deviations from first-come-first-serve, which can be perceived as unfair. In this work, we assess whether such deviations exhibit any systematic bias, by studying position shifting at takeoff queues at the 30 largest US airports. Our empirical analysis reveals (i) that such deviations can be quite significant with 19\% of the flights in our data exhibiting a shift of five or more positions, and (ii) that an airline's market share at an airport (in terms of number of operated flights) plays a major role in how flights of these airlines are treated. In particular, flights operated by an airline with a larger market share are more likely to move up the queue and the number of spots associated with such a jump increases with the airline's market share. Robustness analyses lend further support to these results and, in particular, Control Function Analysis allow us to decouple the benefits dominant carriers enjoy at airports into their geographical component (i.e., their terminal location with respect to the runway proxied by the shortest taxi-out time) and their preferential treatment in the departure queue. These result have important implications for fairness and its distribution across airlines and their respective flights.