A final chart in this series is to look at a monthly view. We’d expect to see strong seasonality across each year, and the overall trends to be in line with the year view above (slowly up, drop off, then sharp increase).
This is indeed the case, except for one extremely obvious anomaly. The month of September 2000 (one year before the 9/11 attacks) has about 1,000 routes, when we’d have expected cyprus mobile numbers around 5,000. This accounts for the dip in the yearly view seen on the previous chart. Investigating this further we went back to the source data provided and the file contained this number of records. With no discernible reasons to account for such a low number it’s likely to indicate an error in the source data provided.
If we agree with the hypothesis that the downturn between 2009 and 2014 was caused by the financial crisis in the UK at the time, then repeating this analysis in a few years will see what effects the currently uncertain political climate has on the aviation industry in the near future.
We could spend plenty more time in looking at how these flights breakdown by Scheduled/Charter flights, how this changes over the seasons and how it has changed over time. We could also look at flights by particular airlines or to particular destinations and see the patterns of how these change over time.
Flight Delays
Looking at general trends is interesting, but this gives just a shape of some of the volumes and how they’re changing over time. The main reason for this data set to be made available is to enable reporting on flight delay information across UK airports.