Flight Departures Data
We are going to look at flight departures and diagram the origin and destination city-pairs. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) has a lot of interesting transportation data. The American Statistical Association (ASA) had a contest a few years ago that used flight data from the BTS. The ASA cleaned the files up a little and provided a data dictionary. We will use the ASA’s version of the data, which you can find at http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/the-data.html
You could get more recent data directly from BTS, but I’m going to use the oldest data I can find that includes airplane tail numbers. You’ll see why that is important shortly. Download the data set from 1999.
There are two other files that we also want, which can be found at http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/supplemental-data.html. Download the airport and carrier CSV files.