Admistrative:

Please indicate

  • Who you collaborated with: Katherine Hobbs (mostly), Kyra Gray & Nina Sonneborn (briefly in class)
  • Roughly how much time you spent on this HW so far: Probably about 10 hours
  • The URL of the RPubs published URL here.
  • What gave you the most trouble: the group_by function gave me a lot of trouble, and I kept getting error codes, but I think it’s just a matter of figuring out when it will work with other functions and when I am piping.
  • Any comments you have:

Question 1:

Plot a “time series” of the proportion of flights that were delayed by > 30 minutes on each day. i.e.

  • the x-axis should be some notion of time
  • the y-axis should be the proportion.

Using this plot, indicate describe the seasonality of when delays over 30 minutes tend to occur.

From the graph produced by the above code, we can see that the winter months are the worst for this airport in terms of proportion of flights delayed for more than 30 minutes. We see the proportion of delayed flights dip starting in July, and then peak up again in late December. This is likely due to an increase in troublesome weather such as intense rains or snow in winter months.

It is important to recognize that when I created a variable for “over30”, I eliminated approximately 2900 N/A data points. These were lines in the data set that had a date associated with them, but not any information regarding flight time delays. However, there are over 220,000 entries total in the data set, so it is possible that removing the N/As might not make a huge impact.

Question 2:

Some people prefer flying on older planes. Even though they aren’t as nice, they tend to have more room. Which airlines should these people favor?

carrier avg_age std_dev num_of_planes
MQ 34.3 3.2 55
AA 29.3 6.1 1368
DL 25.7 8.4 2573
US 24.1 6.1 3830
UA 19.6 4.2 2013
WN 18.0 7.1 44054
XE 15.6 2.8 71023
CO 14.9 6.2 67804
FL 13.9 3.7 1939
YV 12.1 2.2 78
F9 12.1 1.9 814
EV 11.4 3.5 2066
OO 11.0 2.7 15541
NA 11.0 3.5 6
AS 10.4 3.5 363
B6 9.9 2.5 648

People who prefer older planes should choose the carrier MQ (Envoy Air), AA (American Airlines), or DL (Delta), because these airlines have the oldest planes on average. Interestingly enough, Envoy Air is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Airlines! So those interested in flying on older planes are likely to end up on an AA-owned plane.

Question 3:

  • What states did Southwest Airlines’ flight paths tend to fly to?
  • What states did Southwest Airlines’ flights tend to fly to?

For example, Southwest Airlines Flight 60 to Dallas consists of a single flight path, but since it flew 299 times in 2013, it would be counted as 299 flights.

Southwest Flight Paths by State
State Number of SW Flight Paths
TX 767
FL 297
LA 236
CA 219
OK 178
IL 163
NV 123
CO 121
TN 107
AZ 106
MO 101
NM 80
MD 79
MS 78
AL 52
NA 52
SC 43
PA 35
AR 28
NJ 26
Southwest Flights by State
state Number of SW Flights
TX 16709
FL 3977
LA 3343
CA 2777
OK 2319
IL 2072
NV 1536
CO 1435
TN 1371
AZ 1365
MO 1319
MD 1217
NM 1014
MS 1012
NA 727
AL 685
SC 588
PA 434
NJ 385
AR 361

Southwest Airlines’ flight PATHS tended to fly mostly to other places in Texas. Following that, the most popular flight paths were to Florida, Louisiana, and California.

Southewest Airlines’ FLIGHTS tended to fly to airports in the state of Texas as well. Simiarly to its flight paths, the most popular flights were also to Florida, Louisiana, and California.

Question 4:

I want to know proportionately what regions (NE, south, west, midwest) each carrier flies to/from Houston in the month of July. Consider the month() function from the lubridate package.

This graph presents a good visual representation of data, and informs us that many of the carriers that go to and from Houston have a main region of the US that they tend to fly to in the month of July. For example, American Airlines appears to fly exclusively to and from the South. Additionally, JetBlue (carrier B6) is one of the few carriers that makes a lot of flights to the Northeast, which could be an inconvenience to those from Houston who need to make regular trips to that region.