

Show HN: Flight Times Sliced, Diced and Visualized (side project) - nikhizzle
http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/san-francisco/to/los-angeles

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smackfu
I think you need to exclude months or weeks with zero flights, otherwise you
get bad data for seasonal routes.

For instance, look at this one: [http://flightsphere.com/flight-
time/from/hartford/to/las-veg...](http://flightsphere.com/flight-
time/from/hartford/to/las-vegas)

It's clearly a daily flight, based on the per-day chart, but it says it is 5
days a week, because they don't run it year-round.

~~~
nikhizzle
I was looking into temporal filtering algorithms, but clearly your fix is much
simpler and better. Sometimes, simplicity trumps sophistication.

Two beers payable in the bay area!!

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boothead
Looks really cool. One small suggestion, sprinkle over some dc.js [1] and add
some interactivity :-)

[1] [http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/](http://nickqizhu.github.io/dc.js/)

~~~
nikhizzle
This is actually perfect for my next visualization project, where I'm going to
start digging into SEC data.

I invest in equities and I find I never have the correct information in the
right format.

~~~
boothead
Indeed - I wish I had know about dc (or dc had existed) when I was working in
hedge fund land. Would have made my life a lot easier :-)

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bargl
The only thing I think is missing here boarding times for the different
carriers. I was reading somewhere (I can't find the link) that southwest has
the best method right now. I did find a link to another site that seems to
have similar content but doesn't mention Southwests boarding style (because it
isn't random it is based on least resistance boarding).
[http://menkes76.com/projects/boarding/boarding.htm](http://menkes76.com/projects/boarding/boarding.htm)

Edit: Note Dewey found the right article below.

~~~
dewey
This could be the article you are looking for:
[http://www.vox.com/2014/4/25/5647696/the-way-we-board-
airpla...](http://www.vox.com/2014/4/25/5647696/the-way-we-board-airplanes-
makes-absolutely-no-sense)

Discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649026)

~~~
personlurking
And Mythbusters Boarding segment here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERt7EhX-
gtE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERt7EhX-gtE)

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mikegreen
Interesting.

Riddle me this: [http://flightsphere.com/flight-
time/from/atlanta/to/chicago](http://flightsphere.com/flight-
time/from/atlanta/to/chicago)

It says United has 6 flights per week from Atlanta to Chicago. They have 6 or
7 per day in reality.

How are airports in metro areas consolidated? Are you using MDW instead of ORD
for "Chicago"?

~~~
nikhizzle
Thanks for finding this, I owe you a beer. Payable any time in the bay area.

It is probably a bug in my data pipeline. I will look into this.

I consolidate all airports in a metro area, MDW and ORD for Chicago.

~~~
sardonicbryan
I'm pretty sure UA has more than 48 flights a week to the NY area as well if
you're aggregating JFK, LGA and EWR,the number should be closer to 20 per day.
I just arbitrarily picked Friday, 10/17 from SFO => NYC and there are 23
flights. Your number might be right if excluding EWR, which like SFO is a
major UA hub.

~~~
nikhizzle
yeah, EWR comes under Newark. Though I should consider merging metropolitan
areas beyond cities.

[http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/newark/to/san-
franc...](http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/newark/to/san-francisco)

~~~
sardonicbryan
Most cities actually have an airport code as well, ie CHI for Chicago and NYC
for New York. It might be worthwhile to piggyback off of that for
consistencies sake.

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coherentpony
Unfortunately, it's fairly difficult to make any concrete conclusions from
flight time, especially at a time resolution of one minute. The jet stream and
other weather processes affect flight time by more than a minute. This also
holds for mechanical reasons as well, since airplanes that have squawked 7700
will almost certainly be given landing priority, leaving other airplanes in
the air for longer while they wait their turn.

~~~
nikhizzle
I agree. I did the best I can by using the median over all flights from the
past 12 months.

But yes, there are a lot of irregular operations which can throw any
conclusions to the wind. That said, when I was exploring this data I found
that delays etc were much less frequent that I perceived.

------
jwess
Nice job, I especially like the "Route Facts" in the bottom-left. Last year I
made a video tutorial using the same BTS data showing how to extract similar
flight insights using Excel: [https://pjw.me/data-analysis-and-dashboards-
with-excel.htm](https://pjw.me/data-analysis-and-dashboards-with-excel.htm)

------
falcolas
Appears to be missing data from Alaska Airlines. A lot of flights in the NW
are handled by Alaska, so there's a number of missing connections from my
local airport.

[EDIT] Not quite correct, just missing all the Alaska airlines flights out of
Bozeman. Perhaps missing the turboprop data?

~~~
nikhizzle
Can you give me an example? Thanks! I also owe you a beer payable in the bay
area at any time.

I only have data for airlines with revenues > $20m, but I'm pretty sure Alaska
falls into this group.

~~~
falcolas
[http://flightsphere.com/flight-
time/from/bozeman](http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/bozeman)

[http://www.alaskaair.com/](http://www.alaskaair.com/) \- search BZN to SEA,
there's an average of 2 flights per day

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fuzzythinker
Very interesting visualization. One thing I want to point out however is the
rearrangement of the widgets should not be based on its size, but on
relatedness instead. An for that to happen, you need to design the layout
instead of using auto re-arrangement based on screen size.

~~~
nikhizzle
Good point, the tradeoffs between making something visually interesting vs
relevant from a visualization point of view were really tough on this project.
I will look into some kind of compromise. Related data does not always look
good next to each other.

More broadly, when I visualize a set of data I follow Alberto Cairo's
guidelines of Organize, Compare, and Correlate. In this project, I moved away
from that quite a bit because I was seeking to make something interesting as
opposed to useful.

I was scratching an existential need I had to make this data accessible and
interesting. :)

~~~
fuzzythinker
For me, I see the following sets of widgets highly related and should be next
to each other:

\- Flight Time By Airline, .. by Time of Day, Average Timeline

\- Flights By Month, .. by Day of Week, .. by Time of Day

But they are not, when I adjust from screen wide from all sizes from 860 to
2740.

~~~
nikhizzle
Thanks for the feedback. I will play with your suggested arrangements a bit in
my next iteration.

I've added it to my basecamp.

------
lozf
> We only have domestic, non-stop flights for now

Should mention that it's US only.

London / Edinburgh or Mumbai / New Delhi are still "Domestic" flights.

/PEDANT

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lightningstorm
Looks like you are pretty active around the web. Adding a github/twitter link
might help get more feedback and allow other devs to find you.

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sk24iam
Nice work,how do you plan to monetize? Affiliate links to online travel
agencies?

~~~
nikhizzle
not really sure yet. This is just a demo of a real time analytics system I'm
building.

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shamsulbuddy
what technology you have used here for charts as it doesnt seems to be d3.
Also will you be able to opensource the data behind it ?

~~~
nikhizzle
The data is already open source:

[http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Fields.asp?Table_ID=236](http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Fields.asp?Table_ID=236)

I did use d3 for the charts. Some were in SVG and some were in html. D3 is
good for manipulating any kind of dom tree.

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fireworks10
What your data source / API?

