anyflights

anyflights supplies a set of functions to query air travel data. With a user-defined year and airport, the anyflights function will grab data on:

• flights: all flights that departed a given airport in a given year
• weather: hourly meterological data for a given airport in a given year
• airports: airport names and locations
• airlines: translation between two letter carrier codes and names

The package also includes a set of functions to query each of the above datasets individually. Each of the functions are named get_ followed with the names of the datasets (shown above in code), and require a varying combination of the station (i.e. airport code), year (as an integer), and dir (folder in the working directory to save to) arguments.

The main intent of this package, among others, is to allow for students learning the basics of R and the tidyverse through labs working with the nycflights13 package to work with more recent data from their own hometowns or from the airport closest to their school. An instructor can use this package to generate a folder of data (~5MB) that can be distributed to students through Dropbox, GitHub, etc. As a result, students can make discoveries that could impact their own, real-life air travel decisions. (I was introduced to R through a guided analysis of the nycflights13 data, and have since longed to create this package for this reason.)

This package is inspired by and derived from Hadley Wickham's nycflights13. However, note that the planes dataset is not included in the downloads for now, as the source for the planes dataset changes the formatting of the files nearly every year. A (now-deprecated) function get_planes is in the R folder, but is not exported in the build. This function may be available in later versions.

These functions require a strong connection to run; expect several minutes of runtime, especially for the anyflights and get_flights functions.

For now, years 2015 and on are supported. The FAA usually posts all of the data for a given year during February or March of the following year. All airports with an FAA LID code are supported, to my knowledge.

You can install the latest version of anyflights with the following code.

# install.packages("devtools")
# library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("simonpcouch/anyflights")

Simon P. Couch