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

Cargo updated

It's been a while since I updated the cargo dashboard in Tableau.
Now it has the latest 2015 data. These are complete for 31 states from Jan 2008 to June 2015. There is already data for 20 states in December 2015, but we'll have to wait for the full 2015 data.

See the link at the top of the page for access to Tableau.

If any of you are using SDMX to access these Eurostat aviation data (avia_gor_xx), note that they've changed a code for one of the dimensions: from FRM_CAF_DEP to CAF_FRM_DEP. Obvious! Apart from that the update process was smooth (thanks to the RJSDMX package maintainers in R, and all the other R and Tableau folk).

Tableau Hex Map for Europe

Solved the problem I was having with different parts of the dashboard having different colour schemes - after filtering.  I had been assigning colours per worksheet - you need to reset these if you've done it and go back to the original field in the data and set the colour there. (Hint was from the kind answer to this question.)

Obvious, really.

I also managed to get rid of the persistent axis. Right clicking in the row or column shelf and choosing format, click on the 'line' option (a brush) in the format and here was a case where it had not already been set to 'none' (in spite of trying!).

Tile-based maps and Service Unit Forecasts

I have been experimenting with tile-based maps in Tableau.

The use-case is showing growth of total en route service units (actual and forecast), and using the map as a way to select a subset of a large table. The data are from the EUROCONTROL/STATFOR forecast (Feb 16, Annex 5).

The place to start for hints on how to do this in Tableau is Sir Vizalot, though some of the links in this seem to be broken.

My specific steps were:
1) I'm interested in a specific set of European States. I used 'keynote' (powerpoint) to create hex tiles and move them around until I had an initial layout of European countries I thought was reasonable.
2) I converted this into a table of coordinates, using the ISO 2-letter country codes (and using IA and IC for Azores and Canaries, respectively).
3) I pulled these data into Tableau, including a translation table from ISO to EUROCONTROL's ICAO-based State codes. Tableau does a nice job of choosing the right joins.
4) Setting up the hex map follows smoothly using Sir Vizalot's advice, though it took me a while to realise I shouldn't start worrying about size & shape of the 'map' until it was embedded in a dashboard. And the alignment of the labels defaults to off the hex - fixed using the label:alignment option.

A couple of things I'm not yet happy with: the colour scale for the growth legend doesn't seem fully coordinated between the map and bubble plot; and I'm left with an axis which should have been turned off, but is still there. Hints welcome!

Here's what it looks like:

and here's a hex you can load into your Tableau.

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.