We used a site called flightstats.com to download historical departing flight information from Lambert Airport for our project. Each departing flight was organized by airline, flight number, gate number, scheduled departing time, and actual departing time as seen below.
Any flights unassigned to gates or airlines were immediately filtered out of the spreadsheet. Additionally, we wanted our model to feature only commercial flights so we also threw out all private/chartered flight information. Total delay was calculated by taking the difference between actual and scheduled departing times. If a flight left earlier than previously scheduled, the delay time is zero (not negative). we settled on gathering flight data for October 1st, 2013, a day that we assumed would have standard travel delays because it is not near a holiday nor was weather particularly bad on that day (it was 74 degrees and there was 0 precipitation). On October 1st, 2013, there were 479 flights that left between 6am and 9:45pm. Between all of the gates combined, there was a sum of 1906 minutes of delay. This only averages out to being 3.98 minutes of delay per flight. The longest delay of the day was 70 minutes, while some flights were as early as 22 minutes ahead of schedule. Additionally, we were able to filter our data to isolate each gate’s total delay as seen below:
Any flights unassigned to gates or airlines were immediately filtered out of the spreadsheet. Additionally, we wanted our model to feature only commercial flights so we also threw out all private/chartered flight information. Total delay was calculated by taking the difference between actual and scheduled departing times. If a flight left earlier than previously scheduled, the delay time is zero (not negative). we settled on gathering flight data for October 1st, 2013, a day that we assumed would have standard travel delays because it is not near a holiday nor was weather particularly bad on that day (it was 74 degrees and there was 0 precipitation). On October 1st, 2013, there were 479 flights that left between 6am and 9:45pm. Between all of the gates combined, there was a sum of 1906 minutes of delay. This only averages out to being 3.98 minutes of delay per flight. The longest delay of the day was 70 minutes, while some flights were as early as 22 minutes ahead of schedule. Additionally, we were able to filter our data to isolate each gate’s total delay as seen below: