Applied case · Transportation and operations · about 65 minutes
Which carrier is more punctual?
Compare departure delays for four carriers when most flights leave on time and a few are hours late: choose summaries and tests that respect heavy skew, measure the share of late flights, and check whether weather explains the gaps.
The brief
A mid-sized company's corporate travel desk books about 4 000 domestic flights a year for staff attending meetings and site visits. It is negotiating a preferred-carrier agreement: a volume discount in exchange for routing most bookings to one airline. Price differences between the shortlisted carriers are small, so the travel manager wants to choose on punctuality — missed meetings and rebooked connections cost far more than a few riyals on a fare.
You have 2 500 scheduled departures from June–August 2024 for the four shortlisted (fictional) carriers (flight_delays, synthetic): carrier, origin, distance, scheduled hour, whether adverse weather was reported, and the departure delay in minutes (negative = early).
The travel manager's questions: Which carrier is most punctual? Is the difference real or noise? Could it just be that some carriers flew in worse weather?
Carriers, airports and flights are synthetic, generated for teaching.
Dataset
Departure delays
2,500 rows · one row = one scheduled flight departure · synthetic data
| Flight | Date | Airline | Origin | Distance (km) | Scheduled hour (hour) | Adverse weather | Departure delay (minutes) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F0001 | 2024-06-01 | Sienna Jet | Central | 561 | 8 | false | 0 |
| F0002 | 2024-06-01 | Cobalt Wings | Ridge | 394 | 9 | false | 3 |
| F0003 | 2024-06-01 | Amber Air | Lakeside | 451 | 9 | false | 7 |
| F0004 | 2024-06-01 | Sienna Jet | North Field | 776 | 10 | false | -1 |
| F0005 | 2024-06-01 | Sienna Jet | Ridge | 1285 | 11 | false | -3 |
| F0006 | 2024-06-01 | Amber Air | Central | 378 | 12 | false | 5 |
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