A method of using airport surveillance data to determine a location of a delay and an amount of time a vehicle is subjected to the delay during a movement of the vehicle between locations including obtaining a time-ordered sequence of data points representing the movement of the vehicle, creating a speed vector (sv) for each data point, replacing ground speed elements in the speed vector (sv) with a one when the ground speed element is less than a speed threshold, performing a spatial density test on each data point in a sequence of consecutive one entries, defining a starting and stopping index for a consecutive sequence of data points as a preliminary hold, determining whether to merge adjacent preliminary holds, determining a time duration of each preliminary hold and eliminating any preliminary hold having a time duration less than a predetermined time duration and outputting the results.