Tweet Analysis for Flight Delays

Tweet Analysis for Flight Delays

Link: https://public.tableau.com/s/gallery/flight-delays

Graham Hawkes said, “There’s something just magical about flight. Period.” This magical aspect of flight is the most important when it comes to customer satisfaction. Airlines companies are focusing more on this aspect than anything else because this is the prime factor affecting the airlines business on a whole.

A flight delay means an airplane arriving or departing sometime later than its scheduled time. Referring to the guidelines set up by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a flight is declared as delayed if there is a minimum difference of fifteen minutes between its actual and official arrival or departure timings. Judging from a customer’s perspective, the consequences of a delayed flight can be extreme sometimes for an airline. Moving further, we will be discussing some key insights after analyzing the tableau public report on ‘Plane Delays and Tweets’.

The main reason for flight delay in the Southwest Airlines, the airline having the highest percentage of flights (34%) in the dataset, is the Late Aircraft Delay. Moreover, Southwest is the only airline which has some of its flight delays due to Security Delay. Other flight delay factors like Airline Delay, Air System Delay, and Weather Delay are the ones primarily responsible for flights delay for Delta Airlines. Virgin America, having the least percentage of flights in the dataset (2%), has the highest average delay of eight minutes. One of the most alarming insight is related to US Airways which has the highest percentage of negative tweets (78%) among all the airlines present in the dataset.

Among all the airlines having departure flight details in the dataset, Delta Airlines is the only one which has a negative value of average departure time during some of the hours in a day. Highest negative average delay (-23 minutes) among all flights is for United Airlines in its flights arriving at 9 AM during a day. Highest average delay (43 minutes) among all the airlines in their arriving flights is encountered at 9 PM by American Airlines.

Another great insight from the Twitter Data section of the report, showing the Tweet Sentiments “Around the 24-Hour Clock”, points towards the highest number of bad sentiment tweets for United Airlines. Specifically speaking about the flight delays at the airports, the Puerto Rican airport BQN, Rafael Hernandez, has an average departure delay of 102 minutes which is more than double the average delay at any other airport mentioned in the dataset.