Microsoft® MapPoint® Example: Airline Delays

The airline depicted here has received a poor ranking in the FAA's report of on-time performance for February, and wishes to understand why this is the case.

The total numbers of on-time and late flights are available for each airport in the system. We add city and state information to each airport identifier and plot it in Microsoft MapPoint.

Mapping Flight Delays against Snowfall

This map plots pie charts for each airport with the late flights represented by the yellow slice. The size of the pie chart represents the total number of flights for that airport. From this we can instantly see that the biggest effect on the total on-time record is due to the two hub airports at San Francisco and Chicago. San Francisco helped to pull the on-time record up, whilst Chicago has pulled it down.

The data is for February, so perhaps the weather influences the on-time record? The individual States are shaded according to their average snowfall using the data that comes with Microsoft MapPoint. We can see that the airports with poor on-time records correlate pretty well with regions with high snowfall. The second map zooms in on the eastern US to show this correlation in more detail. The more northerly states receive more snowfall and tend to have poor on-time records.

Conclusions

Here, Microsoft MapPoint is used to visually show the influence of hub airports on the final on-time record, and the general correlation between another factor (snowfall) and an airport's on-time record.

Are you interested in using MapPoint to solve similar problems for your organisation? If so, Contact us and we can get MapPoint working efficiently to solve your business problems.

Return to the Main MapPoint Articles Page.