The objective of this paper is to explore the impact of various weather conditions on flight departure, taxi-out delays and then create a model that could predict the delays given the weather forecast. For this study, we use historical flight data and hourly weather data for 10 geographically distinct airports. We conducted an in-depth analysis of the correlations among weather metrics, departure delay, and taxi-out time. Given the substantial impact of taxi times on flight delays, we placed considerable emphasis on investigating patterns related to taxi-out durations. Subsequently, we identified the primary weather factors influencing delays at each location. Following this, we undertook exploratory analysis to ascertain the specific weather phenomena associated with each corresponding weather factor. In an effort to create a robust predictive model, we performed several data processing steps such as outlier removal, normalisation, encoding.
The code for the entire analysis can be viewed here: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11vvVF8rYtVIRH6VyhUCsJTrZAooMgdmB?usp=sharing
A summary of the findings can be viewed in "Flight delays.pdf".