The aviation community is currently working on the standardization of data communication systems for the future air traffic management. In this context, the ICAO and EUROCONTROL are working on the standardization of IPbased aeronautical telecommunications network and future radio access technologies, respectively. With this work, for the first time, we integrate L-DACS 1, which is one candidate for future radio access technologies, with realistic IP-based network layer functionality and analyze the handover delay performance. We first investigate the effect of link layer retransmissions on handover delay performance. We realized that for regions with low signal-to-noise ratio (BER of 10-3 ), link layer retransmissions improve the total handover delay (layer 2 and 3) by about 80 %. Considering regions with high signal-to-noise ratio (BER of 10-5 ), the benefit of link layer retransmissions becomes negligible due to the reduced number of packet losses. During our analysis, we notice freq...