When a disturbance cannot be absorbed by schedule buffer, the tactical schedule recovery process of an airline prioritises between flights. This considers the cost of delay and may result in a reallocation of scarce airport resources during turnaround. Delay cost reference values do not differentiate between specific flights but rather aircraft types. This article presents a method to develop flight-specific delay cost functions, which consider inherent absorption capacities and downstream uncertainties. Delay propagation trees are used to model airline resource interdependencies and derives the associated cost of downstream delay cost-drivers from dependent probabilities using operational data. In a case study setting, the resulting stochastic cost functions are compared against reference values per aircraft type and deterministic step-cost functions per flight
