2015 Flight Delay/Cancellation Analysis
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1. The document analyzes flight delay data from the US Department of Transportation for 2015. The data is cleaned and organized into tables for airports, airlines, and flights in SQL Server. 2. Airlines are ranked based on their on-time performance, cancellations, and early/late departures. Hawaiian Airlines ranks first while Spirit Airlines ranks last. 3. Visualizations of the flight data and airline rankings are created in Tableau, including plots of flight delays between airports and an airline performance matrix.
2015 Flight Delay/Cancellation Analysis
- 1. 2015 Flight Delay Analysis
- 2. 1. Description of data- The U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) Bureau of Transportation Statistics releases the data relating to flights and the delays. The data under analysis is data relating to flight delay, cancellations, arrival times and departure times in the year 2015. This data is taken from Kaggle. The data is in the form of .csv files which need to be imported in SQLServer for analysis. The data is cleaned in R before inserting into MS SQL server. Source of data- https://www.kaggle.com/usdot/flight-delays/data Tables- a) Airports b) Airlines c) Flights Metadata- a. Airport- This table contains data related to airports such as IATA_CODE, AIRPORT, CITY, STATE, LATTITUDE and LONGITUDE. b. Airlines- This table maps the Airline Operator names with their IATA_CODES. c. Flights- This table contains data related to flight arrival, departures across all the Airports and all Airlines. This is the major table of interest which will be used for all the analysis. Flights table shares airline ‘IATA_CODE’ with Airlines table, and airport ‘IATA_CODE’ with Airports table. 2. Data Analysis Plan
- 4. 4. Data Preparation The data is first cleaned using R. Relevant columns are added for departure data and time, and irrelevant columns are removed. Instead of collecting all the information in one table, the data is divided into three relevant tables that can be joined to get required information. All the tables are connected with appropriate foreign keys which follow all major constraints in the database. 5. Problems in the data- Out of the three tables, a. Airports- This table does not have any missing values or bad column names. b. Airlines- This table does not have any bad column names. However, it does have some missing values for the latitude and longitude of the airports. select * from dbo.airports where LATITUDE is NULL or LONGITUDE IS IATA_CODE AIRPORT CITY STATE COUNTRY LATITUDE LONGITUDE ECP Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport Panama City FL USA NULL NULL PBG Plattsburgh International Airport Plattsburgh NY USA NULL NULL UST Northeast Florida Regional Airport (St. Augustine Airport) St. Augustine FL USA NULL NULL Solution- The data relating to the latitude and the longitude of the above airports was taken from Wikipedia and inserted into the database to complete the table. update dbo.airports set LATITUDE=30.357, Longitude = -85.7938 where IATA_CODE like 'ECP' update dbo.airports set LATITUDE=44.6519, Longitude = -73.4657 where IATA_CODE like 'PBG' update dbo.airports set LATITUDE=29.9547, Longitude = -81.343 where IATA_CODE like 'UST' /*Checking the existence of NULL values */ select * from dbo.airports where LATITUDE is NULL or LONGITUDE IS NULL; (0 rows affected) c. Flights- This table has some missing values. However, since the table is very large, we will keep the missing values for now and decide whether to remove the missing values in the data analysis stage.
- 5. 6. On-time Performance, Market Share Analysis- According to Bureau of Transport Statistics, a flight is considered to be delayed if it takes off after 15 minutes of its scheduled departure. The listed flights are analysed for its on-time performance and the market share is calculated based on the number of flights in the given year. Following four segments are defined and the airlines in each segment need different strategies. Exhibit 1 Segment Airlines Features Strategy A Delta Air Lines Inc. High Market Share Take steps to increase market share Skywest Airlines Inc. Better on-time performance Streamline the operations for better on-time performanceAmerican Airlines Inc. B Hawaiian Airlines Inc. Low Market Share Take steps to increase market share Alaska Airlines Inc Better on-time performance US Airways Inc. Atlantic Southeast Airlines Virgin America American Eagle Airlines Inc. C Southwest Airlines Co. High Market Share Streamline the operations for better on-time performance D JetBlue Airways Low Market Share Streamline the operations for better on-time performance Frontier Airlines Inc. Poor On-Time Performance United Air Lines Inc. Spirit Air Lines
- 6. 7. Ranking Airlines- The airlines were ranked based on following criterion- a. On-time departure are taken into consideration b. Cancellations are penalized three times as compared to delays c. Early departures are penalized two times as compared to delays d. Average rank is calculated based on all the ranks A flight is considered to be delayed if it leaves 15 minutes after the scheduled departure time. Similarly, an early departure is considered when a flight departs 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. Punctuality score is calculated as- Punctuality Score = (On − time Departure %) − 2 ∗ (Early Departure %) − 3 ∗ (Cancellation%) Punctuality Score for Airlines- Rank Airline Airline Name Punctuality Score 1 HA Hawaiian Airlines Inc. 90.3647 2 DL Delta Air Lines Inc. 84.5139 3 VX Virgin America 78.8362 4 US US Airways Inc. 77.3082 5 AA American Airlines Inc. 76.9372 6 AS Alaska Airlines Inc. 75.4499 7 WN Southwest Airlines Co. 74.7893 8 OO Skywest Airlines Inc. 74.03 9 UA United Air Lines Inc. 72.0044 10 EV Atlantic Southeast Airlines 70.2602 11 B6 JetBlue Airways 70.1743 12 F9 Frontier Airlines Inc. 68.8725 13 NK Spirit Air Lines 63.6093 14 MQ American Eagle Airlines Inc. 59.4179
- 7. Exhibit 2- Interactive Visualization at- https://public.tableau.com/views/AirlinePunctuality/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes &:showVizHome=no Airline Name 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100 Punct ualit y Score Hawaiian Airlines Inc. Delt a Air Lines Inc. Virgin America USAirways Inc. American Airlines Inc. Alaska Airlines Inc. Sout hwest Airlines Co. Skywest Airlines Inc. Unit ed Air Lines Inc. At lant ic Sout heast Airlines Jet Blue Airways Front ier Airlines Inc. Spirit Air Lines American Eagle Airlines Inc. Punct ualit y Ranking 1 14 Punct ualit yRank Sum of Punct ualit y Score for each Airline Name. Color shows sum of Punct ualit yRank.
- 8. 8. Infographic Based on Analysis Exhibit 3
- 9. 9. Visualizations in Tableau- Please visit following link for interactive visualization story. https://public.tableau.com/shared/PPKDMCWYX?:display_count=yes a. Analysis of flights between each pair of source and destination- The user can select source and destination airports to see the status of all flights between source and destination. Hovering the mouse on these paths and airports will reveal more information about the flights such as percentage cancellations, average departure delay etc. Exhibit 4
- 10. b. Airline Performance Matrix- The performance is calculated based on the dataset created in R. Hovering on each of the circle reveals more information about the airline performance. Darker red color represents more percentage cancellation. Please visit following link for interactive viz story. https://public.tableau.com/shared/PPKDMCWYX?:display_count=yes Exhibit 5.
- 11. c. Regression of Arrival and Departure Delays- A regression line with 95% confidence interval is passed through the data. Please visit following link for interactive viz story. https://public.tableau.com/shared/PPKDMCWYX?:display_count=yes Exhibit 6.