Delta Airline Flight Route Dashboard

Delta Airlines Flight Route Dashboard

Defining Question

As someone who is an aviation geek, I created this dataset just to get a little bit more of an idea about Delta Airlines operations, especially since they now have a main hub at the Salt Lake City International Airport. This has made me wonder what former Delta hubs might see less flights, as well as what airports are and aren’t priorities for Delta. Therefore, my defining question was just about the operations of Delta, and understand the current situation with the airline.

Even though I wanted to see how busy airports were, I also decided to get specific date, airport, time, flight, and aircraft information to make the dashboard more robust. I wanted to make this an ‘all-in-one’ dashboard.

Collecting Data

There are three sources of data that is needed for this project. Note: this is the same data used for the fleet age project.

The first set of data is the actual flight data of flight (in this case, we are looking at flights in 2022). This provides all of the flight information for each flight by the major carriers in 2022. What’s important with this data is that it also lists the actual aircraft used for each flight. Here is a link to the data.

The second set of data, called the Aircraft Registry, connects the tail number (or “n” number) for an aircraft to both the owner and year that the aircraft was build. This will identify each aircraft that is use in 2022, and give us an idea of the age of each aircraft. Here is a link to the data.

The third set of data will identify the type of aircraft used, as well as the amount of passengers an aircraft can carry. In the Aircraft Registry data, aircraft capacity and type is not given. Instead, a code is given for each type of aircraft. This data set will connect the aircraft to the type. Here is a link to the data.

Data Wrangling

Most of the data that was downloaded was clean in the columns that were important, however data had to be changed. Because the data was less than one million rows, much of the cleaning regarding data types was done in Excel.

Once the joins were done, then I looked at the data just to see the overall view of the April 2022 Delta Airline data. The SQL tables that were created to get a breakdown of the data (looking how times of flights, origins, destinations, etc.) are available on GitHub. Click to the left for click here for the GitHub.

Analyze and Interpret Data

As was mention in the introduction, I wanted to make this an all-in-one dashboard that can give us a birds-eye view of Delta Airlines’ operations during the month of April 2022. While this is technically one dashboard, this actually includes five small dashboards that can answer multiple questions. Therefore, all of the information that I wanted to present for Delta Airlines can be put in one dashboard without making it cluttered.