Delay is one of the most remembered performance indicator of any transportation system
Commercial aviation players understand delay as the period of time by which a flight is late or postponed. Thus, delay may be represented by the difference between scheduled and real times of departure or arrival of a flight
Flight delays have negative impacts, particularly economic, for passengers, airlines and airports
Given the uncertainty of their occurrence, passengers usually plan to travel many hours before their appointments, increasing their trip costs, to ensure their arrival on time. On the other hand, airlines suffer penalties, fines and additional operation costs, such as crew and aircrafts retentions in airports
For this exercise, I took the data that comes from a Kaggle dataset, it tracks the on-time performance of US domestic flights operated by large air carriers in 2015.
Digging into the Data
After looking at the data, I had a couple of questions in mind
- What factors contributes the most to flight delay?
- Which month has the most delay in 2015
- Which state in America has the most flight cancellation?
- What are the conditions that led to the cancellation in Airports?
After cleaning up the data on excel, I exported the .csv file of Kaggle Dataset on Tableau and the journey of aggregating data starts there.
Insights
Insight#1 What causes flight delay?
Flight delay are caused by various reasons. We can see that the late aircraft delay (minutes) contributes the most towards the overall delay and security delay contributes the least.
Insight#2 Which month has the most flight delays in (minutes)
The month of September is a better time to travel as it has the least amount of departure delay averaging 4.8 minutes.
The mid of the year, month of June has the highest average departure delay averaging to 15 minutes.
Insight#3 Which state in America has the most flight cancellation.
The state Texas in America has the most amount of flight cancellation reaching 668 cancellation. It might not be advisable to travel from Texas while Montana has the least amount of cancellation of flight of 3.
Insight#4 What are the conditions that led to cancellations in Airport?
Chicago O’Hare International Airport has amount to over 454 cancellation in 2015 which contributes to the most amount of cancellation across the different airports.
The conditions that led to the cancellation of flight were predominantly due to the weather condition which amount to 253, followed by the NAS of 110, and Airlines of 91.
I’ve put together all these different visualisation together in a dashboard. Check them out here :”)
I’ve just started playing around with Tableau tool. I would like a deeper level of granularity in the data I’m exploring. If there’s any comments that can be of a help to me to better improve my visualisation of data in more meaningful way, please feel free to comment
Conclusion
Flight delays are an important subject in the literature due to their economical and environmental impacts. They may increase ticket costs to customers and operational costs to airlines. Apart from outcomes directly related to passengers, delay prediction is crucial during the decision-making process for every player in the air transportation system
