  Complex networks provide a suitable framework to characterize air traffic.
Previous works described the world air transport network as a graph where
direct flights are edges and commercial airports are vertices. In this work, we
focus instead on the properties of flight delays in the US air transportation
network. We analyze flight performance data in 2010 and study the topological
structure of the network as well as the aircraft rotation. The properties of
flight delays, including the distribution of total delays, the dependence on
the day of the week and the hour-by-hour evolution within each day, are
characterized paying special attention to flights accumulating delays longer
than 12 hours. We find that the distributions are robust to changes in takeoff
or landing operations, different moments of the year or even different airports
in the contiguous states. However, airports in remote areas (Hawaii, Alaska,
Puerto Rico) can show peculiar distributions biased toward long delays.
Additionally, we show that long delayed flights have an important dependence on
the destination airport.
