Reducing the delays of the departing aircraft can potentially lead to improving the
e±ciency of the surface operations at airports. This paper addresses a departure scheduling
problem with an objective to reduce total aircraft delays subject to timing and ordering
constraints. The ordering constraints model the queuing area of airports where the aircraft
align themselves in the form of chains before departing. By exploiting the structure of the
problem, a generalized dynamic programming approach is presented to solve the departure
scheduling problem optimally. Computational results indicate that the approach presented
in this paper is reasonably fast, i:e:, it takes less than one tenth of a second on average to
solve a 40 aircraft problem. Also, the approach produces optimal sequences whose delay
is approximately 12 minutes, on average, less than the delays produced by the First Come
First Serve (FCFS) sequences.