A Comparative Analysis of Air Traffic Network and Performance between the Brazilian and Canadian Airspace

This work provides a comparative analysis of air traffic network and performance between the Brazilian and Canadian airspace. Leveraging open-source flight tracking data, we apply clustering techniques and network theory to evaluate airspace availability and air traffic network structure. Then, we compute key performance indicators to assess air traffic efficiency at multiple scales of the flight operation. The results reveal that airspace availability for commercial flights is more constrained in Brazil, with fewer routes connecting major origin-destination pairs. Yet, the Brazilian network is denser and has better local connectivity. In terms of operational performance, the Canadian routes show higher levels of horizontal en-route efficiency on average, with trajectory inefficiencies mostly attributable to the airspace structure. By contrast, visual inspection of flight trajectories in the Brazilian routes reveals a higher likelihood of holding patterns and vectoring that contributes to the en-route inefficiencies observed. At the terminal area scale, similar trends are observed, with the busiest airports showing the lowest levels of temporal efficiency and more vertically constrained climb and descent operations. This research contributes to establishing a systematic data-driven methodology to evaluate Air Traffic Management performance and foster cross-regional comparisons for continued system improvement.