Introduction

LAX is one of the Largest airports in the United States covering over 400,000 flights yearly. The purpose of this report is to dive deeper into the performance of LAX as an airport, looking into its frequency of flights over the past couple years, its efficiency in comparison to other US airports, and any changes in both of these metrics over the past 3 years.

US Airport Flight Numbers

Lets take a look at how LAX stacks up against the 15 airports in the US with the the most yearly flights from 2018 - 2022.

Can see LAX firmly holds a position as a top 10 airport in the US in terms of flight traffic. Moving forward, we will break down some metrics with these flights

Map

Lets take a look at a map of what airports LAX provides flights to and from within the US. Shown below is a map in which each dot represents an airport in which LAX has flights to.

Flight Metrics

LAX has flights to 106 different airports, Our dataset has information of all flights passing through LAX from 2018 to 2022, let’s take a look at how many flights we have per month.

Total Number of Flights

Odd. There seems to be a very interesting drop in flights from March to April over these 4 years. Why is that? Although we can make assumptions on what could have caused this drop in flights between these months with the graph in front of us, a wiser decision would be to break down the data even further to see if any insights can be drawn. With that said, let’s take a look at monthly flights by every year.

Flights by Year

Breaking it down by year as we did above, we can see an intense drops in overall flights (specifically from March-August) in the year of 2020. With a bit of intuition, we can assess that the reason behind this drop in flight numbers is probably due to Covid-19. How about we look a level deeper into Arrival and Departure flights from LAX

Arrival VS Departure flights

Analyzing the graph comparing arrival and departure flights from LAX, we can see that the two facets almost mirror one another. That is there seems to be roughly an equivalent number of departing and arriving flights by month for all years. Showing how. Covid-19 affected air travel on all ends of the world

Efficiency

Now that we’ve taken a look at flight numbers throughout the years, lets take a look at how efficient LAX was as an airport. A great way to assess this would be to compare delays in estimated arrival times from planes coming out of LAX vs Other Airports. Below we have a box plot visualizing delays in estimated arrival times from LAX and all other US airports.

We can see There is no real noticeable difference in delay times between flights arriving to and departing From LAX. And in our following graph dividing this info by year we can also see that same consistency.