Question: Which airlines experience the highest number of delays?

The dataset, covering 2018–2023, provides information on scheduled and actual arrival and departure times. Data was gathered from Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The charts represent a random sample of 50,000 entries from the original data.

Questions: What is the average amount of time weather delays flights compared to other things? What cities have the most weather delays?

The dataset used contains data from the past six years, 2018-2024, and contains information about the scheduled arrival time, actual arrival time, scheduled departure time, and actual departure time focusing on delays, not cancellations or diverted flights. The data used is a sample from the larger dataset, which contains 30,000,000 observations. Data was gathered from Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The graph on the left shows that Chicago, IL is the city most affected by weather delays, with a delay of 52.45 hours. Chicago, Denver and Atlanta are all top five in flights per day, while Detroit and Minneapolis are the outliers. Four of the five airports are also located in states where snow is a large factor in delays. The graph on the right shows how weather delays compare to others. Weather clearly delays flights more often than the other delay types. This information is useful for flight planning. Weather has a large impact on delaying flights, and as the holiday season closes in, keeping an eye on the weather is crucial for planning.

We were curious if the airline industry had successfully handled the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the drop in travel that followed. To do this, we examined enplanement, which is the total amount of passengers put on flights, of over 350 major airports in the US, from 2019 to 2022.

The graph on the left examines the sum of total passengers in major US airports, in millions, by year. As COVID-19 hit in 2020, a drastic falloff was seen in total throughput, but over the next two years, numbers climbed close to prepandemic efforts.

The graph on the right looks at 5 of the busiest airports: Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, New York, and Chicago, and examines their throughput specifically. Similar to the bar chart, a clear drop was present in 2020, and in 2021 and 2022, the airports grew busier to approach their prepandemic numbers. One benefit from this format is we can see the way specific airports were affected - notably, that Atlanta International Airport took the largest dive, but also had the quickest recover in getting traffic back to normal.

Notably, this dataset, from the Federal Aviation Administration, only goes through 2022, so that remains a shortcoming, as we cannot see further if the impressive bounceback rate of airport throughput continues, or steadies out.

Question: How are flights delays affected across the seasons in a year?

On the left, an interactive graph depicting the average amount of flight delay from 2018-2023 across a sample of 50,000 observations. The table on the right hosts the total amount of delays by season and by length of delay from the same observations.

Question: How do scheduled vs actual flight duration differ?

The dataset used contains data from the past five years (2020-2024) from the 1st of every month of the two carriers, Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines. The data also includes both domestic and international flights, with the outliers filtered out to ensure maximum accurary. Data was gathered from Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The displayed graphs show the different in time between the actual and scheduled time that the carrier claims. Based on this information, we can see that Delta Airlines tends to be the more reliable carrier for accuracy in terms of flight time. We can see that the majority of Delta flights are on time, with only a few outliers. JetBlue, on the other hand, has a wider range of time differences between the actual and scheduled time. The client can use this information to make a more informed decision when booking flights, deciding to pick the more accurate carrier.

Side Note: these graphs do not take into account the reason for the delay, which may impact the client’s decision in terms of which carrier to pick.