Flight Delay Database
flightscience.janniklorenzen.de

As an aviation enthusiast I'm always keeping an eye on aircraft movements around my area. When I recently started a data science course, I decided to track those movements and use them to compile statistics and analyse potential patterns in flight delays. Currently I'm limiting this to Malta, however, I'm considering options to extend these statistics and the tracking to further airports - and potentially bigger ones (I'd love Frankfurt or London, but I have to make sure the system is able to keep up with those and that the data is having a certain quality).

Technically, in it's basics, it's a moderately simple project. I have a light-weight application written in PHP that fetches and scrapes flight information from various sources (mostly from airport websites) and saves them into a database. I enrich this data with details fetched through official APIs like the one offered by FlightAware. Once in a while I have a script running that I call the statistics processor. It fetches the basic data and compiles a list of statistics that then are displayed on the delay database website (for the sake of saving the server from load through calculating the statistics for each visitor).

Speaking long-term, I plan to add additional statistics and publish a report giving some more insights and explanations about the statistics (for Malta only). As mentioned before, I'm also looking at options to extend the tracking beyond Malta, as I'd like to have delay data for both ends.