2016 U.S. Flights

Professional Data to Guide Your Next Trip

Authors：I-Chia Huang, Yuhao Zhu, Shen Wang, Yilun Hua

In 2016, we've wasted, in total, 0 minutes because of flight delay.

which equals to 0 years!

Sam's Sad Story

Sam Doey is a computer engineer working for a big company in Seattle.

Sam was on a business trip in San Francisco, which was right before

the due date of his wife. But unfortunately, Sam’s flight back was

delayed due to mechanical issues, which led to 4 hours of delay in

total. He could not taken other flights due to scarcity of flights

offered that day, so he had to wait anxiously since his wife was at

the hospital ready to deliver their first child.

Finally, Sam got on the plane and arrived at the hospital

. . . . . .5 minutes after his wife gave birth.

Many more incidents similar to Sam’s story happen because of flight

delays, which result in people missing big events in their lives..

Sam is taking his family to San Francisco for vacation. To see the origin airport delay conditions, Sam would like to know:

What is the delay rate for a particular airport at a given month and hour within a day?
How are delay reasons distributed for flight delays at a particular airport?
What is the time within a month or day that is most prone to flight delays?

So he can anticipate potential delays at the airport.

Flight Delays At Major Airports

Tutorial

Use the sliders and buttons at the bottom to explore average delayed conditions at major airports within the selected month and hour.
When a circle on the map is clicked, detailed information regarding delay reasons for the specified airport will be displayed on the right.
Hover over legend in pie chart for more information regarding each delay category.

Knowing possible delays at the airport, Sam would also like to know which airline can save his time the most by exploring the following questions:

Given specific airlines, what are the peak time for delays?
Which airlines tend to operate flights that are on time at a given time?
What is the growth in terms of number of flight operated by different airlines in 2016?

Pick A Favorite Airline To See Its Performance

Flight Distribution by Airlines

Delay vs. On-Time

Day of Week

Distribution by Minutes

Number of Flights by Month

Reset All

By exploring the last two visualizations, Sam now knows how to avoid delay. To make sure he can buy the airplane tickets on time, he uses the current visualization to see:

What are the top 15 destination airports we can reach from a specified origin airport?
How many flights depart from specified origin to chosen destination airport?
Out of all the flights from the same origin airport, what is the percentage of flights from origin to chosen destination airport?

So he can see how many flights there are from Seattle to San Francisco and back and decided to buy early since there are not many flights each day.