Airline Flight Data Analysis – Airport “PageRank”

Now that we have the Airline On-Time Performance data set loaded into parquet files on the Personal Compute Cluster, we can take a look to see what the data set tells us about the state of air transportation in the United States. The first thing I will look at is determining which are the most important airports in the United States. A simple way to determine the most important airport is to count number of flights that handled. However, given that most airline routes leverage a hub-and-spoke system, simply counting flights in and out does not convey how important the airport is for routing airline traffic in general. This because certain hub airports might be critical junctures for the flights in other airports, and as a result, those hub airports might be considered more important even if they have identical or even less flight counts. So how can we identify the most important airports in the United States considering how Read More …