Passenger update, finally

It seems it's always October before the last calendar year is complete. 2017 seems no exception. 

I have updated the passenger data from Eurostat in the dashboard. Congratulations to the Netherlands for already providing data as far as April 2017. Six laggards are still short of data in 2016. October, maybe.

Eurostat air passenger data updated again

I've been having issues loading the Eurostat data with the R package RJSDMX - always timing out at work, and a different configuration error at home. 

In the meantime, the R package 'eurostat' has come along, so I've converted to using this to exploit Eurostat's newish bulk download interface. (Again time-out problems trying to use anything like a filter on this - suggestions are welcome. Could be linked to firewall issues at work but no time to investigate this.)

Anyway, the pax data are now updated (using avia_par_xx). 2015 would be complete, but Poland is missing Q4. 

Air passenger data updated

I've also updated the passenger data. Again, all states seem to have provided data up to at least June 2015. See the link above.

For those of you using SDMX, there are more code changes to download these data:

• PASS_BRD_DEP has become PAS_BRD_DEP
• PASS_ST_DEP has become ST_PAS_DEP
• PASS_CAF_DEP has become CAF_PAS_DEP

Handling odd data

In the avia_par_xx data from Eurostat there are a number of odd values, particularly from France (missing seat counts in some years) or Greece (fewer seats than passengers, which sounds uncomfortable!).

I would like to follow Eurostat's lead and not just throw such observations in the datasets away - they are official, after all. So these numbers are included in total seat and total flight counts, but I've had another try at making the load factor and seats/flight calculations more robust to such issues.

Just a reminder that I use the load factor formula that is not weighted by distance (passengers/seats, not RPK/ASK).

Now I've tried to trap the odd data values, and set them to NULL in the numerator, and 1 in the denominator, so that they have little effect when aggregated into region averages, for example. 

But you'll still see France and Greece graphs doing some odd things.

Flow-control in the flight data!

In tableau, I've not got the functionality out of geographical hierarchies that I was expecting (maybe I'm not doing it right). So instead, I've built a set of prompts that now allow you to look at flows of flights at a variety of different levels of aggregation such as airport-airport, airport-region, airport-country, or country-country.

Not as difficult as I thought it would be, but hat-tip to vizpainter for putting me on the right track.

So check out the new tab in the 'pax' dashboard, that focuses on load factors and aircraft size!

European Flight Data updated

The 'pax' dashboard of European flight data from Eurostat has been updated with 2015 - not all available yet, and I had some difficult loading EL, FR and NO, so these countries only go to 2014.

Improved Passenger Dashboard

To celebrate the completion of the 2014 data from Eurostat, I've reorganised the passenger dashboard so departures from Europe (EU28/EFTA) and arrivals outside Europe are available in a single tab. (Previously they were in 2 separate tabs.)

So if you select Copenhagen, say, you'll see all the flights departing Copenhagen (with passenger and flight counts, seat counts and load factors). If you select JFK, say, you'll see all arrivals at JFK from European airports.

Unfortunately, this data set does not include Turkey as a departure point, so for Turkish airports you can only see arrivals from EU28/EFTA airports.

(I plan to make the same simplification for cargo too, in future.)