little tip: avoid booking flights between 11pm-3am
Using RITA (Research and Innovative Technology Administration) flight delay information for US domestic flights in 2006, 2007 and 2008 the relationship between average departure delay time during different time periods can be explored.
The average flight delay between US domestic flights is 10 minutes. But this simple average calculation depends upon a number of factors. One of the factors is time period. This visualization explores the effects of different time periods on flight delays.
Let's have a look at flight delays by hour of the day
*Note: Red bars indicate delays of more than 45 minutes.
Whoa!!! The difference between the best hour (5 am with 0 minutes) and the worst hour (2 am with 114 minutes) is really huge.
Let's see if there is a relationship between number of flights and flight delays since a common notion is that the greater the number of flights, the greater will be the delay
*Note: Red bars indicate number of flights less than 100,000.
It looks interesting that in general hours with maximum number of flights have the lowest flight delays i.e. there is inverse relationship between number of flights and flight delays.
What about other time periods? Let's quickly explore year, month, day of month and day of week using the buttons below.
*Note: Red dots indicate average delays of more than 10 minutes
We can observe that there are ups and downs in the flight delays however when compared to flight delays by hour it is really not much.
So it seems like that a clever one should avoid booking flights between 11 pm and 3 am to minimize the probability of experiencing major delays.