Methodology

Airport eligibility

An airport qualifies for a /data/airports/{IATA}/ page when we have at least 4 distinct days of departure or arrival observations in the underlying schedule log, within the last 90 days.

Airports below that threshold are intentionally excluded - we'd rather skip them than publish thin, low-confidence data.

Once an airport has a page we keep it, even if our coverage of it later stops. The page then reports what we observed rather than what is current, and its observed-days count makes that visible.

Hourly busyness

For each airport we count scheduled departures (and separately, arrivals) in each local-time hour bucket over a rolling 60-day window. The displayed number is the average flights per day for that hour - dividing by the number of distinct days actually observed, so a half-month dataset doesn't get artificially halved.

• Peak hour: the single hour bucket with the highest average.
• Quietest active hour: the lowest non-zero bucket (so we don't always pick 03:00 at airports with no overnight ops).
• Weekday vs weekend: weekday = Mon-Fri local, weekend = Sat-Sun local at the airport's own timezone.

Top operators and destinations

Both are simple counts: the top airlines (by published flight number) and top other-airports (by paired destination/origin) observed during the same 60-day window. We:

• Count marketed flight numbers, so a codeshare counts once per marketing carrier. (A flight operated by Lufthansa but sold as a United codeshare counts on both lists - this is intentional and matches how passengers experience the schedule.)
• Trim airline names for display ("United Airlines, Inc." -> "United Airlines") but keep the IATA code in parentheses so identity is unambiguous.

Refresh cadence

• Schedule observations: continuously, as flights operate.
• Which airports get a page: rechecked every 6 hours.

Known limits

• Coverage is uneven - some airports have months of data, some have weeks. Each page lists its observed-days count.
• We deliberately do not publish per-flight live status on /data/ - those views are reserved for signed-in users tracking their own trips.
• Historical averages are not a forecast. Holidays, weather, and ATC events can move a real day's traffic far away from the published average.
• "Quietest" rankings exclude airports with fewer than 200 observed departures in the window, to avoid ranking low-volume noise.

Reuse

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