We’ve just launched a new beta feature that allows you to view some interesting commercial airline statistics for travel between two airports. Some of the information currently displayed includes:
Historical air fares for routes between the two airports, including differences by fare class
Alternate routes and carriers and their historical pricing ranges
Cargo carried by each airline
Scheduled flight frequency by airline, including number of flights actually flown
You can find a link to these new reports when viewing a live flight tracking page for a commercial airline flight and looking for the “Insight” link that is displayed on the new “Fare Price” row. Alternatively, you can start from the blank form at flightaware.com/insight/airline_stats.rvt
Let us know what you think about this new feature. We’ll be trying to add more data tidbits from our database as we think of ways to display them.
Is there any chance of a drop-down menu for alternative reporting periods? Everything currently is for the past 12 months. I’d like a chance to see data (especially fare data) for latest 6 months, 30 days, 2 weeks, 1 week, current.
We would love to be able to provide extremely fine time ranges for pricing information. Unfortunately, the data disclosed by the airlines is generally at least 3-6 months old by the time it is communicated to us. So when we say that the data displayed is for the prior year, it is more accurately for the 12 month period starting from the last data record we’ve received.
Does the 3 month lag also apply to the cargo and mail stats shown? Also what is being used for the data source? Just curious on how the data is represented and how weights are being shown or counted, i.e. 100lbs moving from LAX-SEA then SEA-ANC. Would it show this as 100lbs for each leg or 100lbs in the LAX-ANC lane.
We are currently making data updates for all aspects of the Insight reports on only a 3 month cycle. There will be announcements in this forum each time a new data release is made live. The data originates from several sources that we mix together to provide the results, however much of it is from the carrier’s flight paperwork.
For multi-segment flights, our Insight pages currently report only for the final destination and not intermediate stops. However, this is an area that we hope to improve upon in the future–perhaps by having a checkbox that defaults to including intermediate stops, or by displaying intermediate stop data broken out from the total.
Our Insight airline data has been updated today to include statistics from Q4 2009. Since our Insight pages display reports representing the prior 12-month period, it will now be reporting numbers based on the the Q1-Q4 2009 periods.
Remember, if you have a commercial need for something that is not precisely answered by our public Insight pages you can always contact us for a custom report.
The fare information is just amazing - I had no idea that there as as much as a 20 to 1 difference in the fares people paid!
Is there any way to drill down in the data to find out how the lucky people got their $50 fares? I know that if you don’t have the data that you can’t display it, but I sure do hope you have access to it.
Many of the extremely low prices are passengers who redeem frequent flier miles (and pay only taxes or booking fees), or are airline employees flying in non-revenue generating seats.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any more specific information describing the financial transaction behind a specific ticket fare.
There have been some minor improvements this week to the quality of Insight reports. A small number of airports were incorrectly showing few or no rows in the “popular fares” table due to some regional carrier codes not getting mapped properly. Also there were a few small airport codes that weren’t being recognized. Both of these issues have now been fixed for the major cases that were found.
Have there been any updates to this data since 2010?
I like this feature as while it’s not 100% accurate for much of the [unpaid] work I do, it’s a hell of a lot easier to use than DOT raw data (where I have to pull a whole month of data for a whole state then process it in SPSS or excel).
There have actually been a couple of quarterly data updates that I didn’t bother to announce since my last posting. I figured that our Insight feature had become more mature and not very many people were interested in knowing about every update. I can resume doing so if you prefer.
Also, if you enjoy accessing the Insight data, you may be interested in knowing that we have just recently added a new method to FlightXML2 that exposes the same information in a programmatic way: flightxml.flightaware.com/soap/F … ineInsight
There are no special steps to use secondary service. If the flight is in our system, it will be visible. Unfortunately, we do not have full data coverage for all flights outside of our primary service areas, so just search for it by flight number and see if it is there.
The data in here is now a few years old (ie still shows Northwest Airlines in a lot of places) - is there any way that this will be updated, ever? It’s a useful feature and seems to work well, the data is just now a little too old to be useful.
