Abstract: This paper aims to develop solutions for two significant and urgent problems in air
transportation. One is the contradiction between the bustle of main airspaces and the huge aviation industry
development demand, and the other is the contradiction between the large-scale developments of aviation
industry and the traditional aviation management mode. The application of continuous trajectory data and the
development of airflow micro-temporal analysis technology have created the conditions for operational efficiency
assessment in corridors-in-the-sky to meet the challenges of some key issues such as the detection of full process
detection and economic effect measurement. This paper presents a framework for assessing the operational
performance of air passenger flow including temporal variation and spatial state, internal composition
relationship and external connection relationship. Based on the delayed trajectory data of flights and taking time
delay cost as a feedback variable, a series of indicators of delay number, delay duration, delay occurrence area
and delay propensity index are concluded, and the operational performance of air passenger flow of major
corridors-in-the-sky in Sino-U.S. is compared. There are the following findings: the constraints on operational
performance occur mainly in the maintenance phase of the airspace, where delayed trajectory clusters lead to
longer Euclidean distances and narrower flight path activity, resulting in increased flight path rigidity or
invariability and then reduced opportunities for multi-path selection. In addition, the limited over-flow capacity of
the corridors-in-the-sky in China is likely to cause delays in delay-intensive segments and downstream delay
contagion, and also leads to the accumulation of terminal delays. On this basis, this paper expected to play a
certain role in improving the construction of corridors-in-the-sky, improving the utilization rate of airspace,
promoting the reform of airspace configuration and also will bring a comprehensive technical support for
optimisation of dynamic airspace and the implementation of the national strategic plan of “Airspace Channel”.