CODA Taxi Times
Eurocontrol/CODA has been publishing aircraft taxi times by airport for some years. These are calculated, to the nearest minute, from flight-by-flight data provided to CODA by airlines and airports. Airports are included where CODA receives data on more than 100 flights, so it covers airports small and large, mostly in Europe, but some non-European ones with direct flights to Europe.
Taxi out is the time from pushback from the gate, to take off. Taxi in the time from landing to on-blocks at the gate. (With some minor variation for remote stands..)
I've now published
in github some R code for scraping all of these data into a single, tidy dataset. The graph gives an example for 5 big European airports: showing how taxi-in times are shorter than taxi-out, but that there has been little variation over the years (or for that matter between seasons).
After each IATA season (Summer = end March-end October, Winter), CODA publishes 4 reports: taxi-in times, taxi-out times, and the same, but split by ICAO wake turbulence category (WTC). The files were pdf for the first few years, now xlsx.
This project was for me a learning exercise in web-scraping, and in using git and github.
However, the pdf reports by WTC were difficult to read because of the row alignment in the tables, so these are not currently included. Perhaps tabulizer would handle this, but I gave up after wasting some hours trying to get its java to work on my machine, and parsed the tables manually from the text, instead!
