Analyzing My Flying Patterns: Creating a Fictitious Airline and Determining Where and How Often I Fly (2021 Edition)

Hello! This is an addendum to my Analyzing My Flying Patterns report from last year, with data included for 2021! Travel picked up for me again during the second half of 2021, I ended up moving to Austin, Texas, joining an incredible remote-first public interest technology company that has allowed me to continue traveling while coding software that I believe makes our world a better place, and these patterns will continue into next as well! With that being said, it’s time for an update!

Disclaimer, as mentioned in the previous report: for the four main airports I traveled through going up, Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Chicago Midway (MDW), Philadelphia (PHL), and Raleigh (RDU), the numbers are slight estimates from 1998–2015 based on my normal travel pattern of flying roundtrip through PHL and RDU at least once a year (with a couple of exceptions). However, the data for the remaining airports is correct.

A Map of Every Airport I Have Traveled Through

Since I was born in 1998, I have traveled through a total of sixty-two airports ranging across four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America).

In the United States, these airports are spread across eighteen states dotted throughout the country and through every time zone in the continental United States. In 2020, this number was sixteen states, but in 2021, Alaska and Wyoming joined the list, with my first-time visits to Jackson Hole, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and the northernmost point in the United States, Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow!)

Ajay Airlines: My Flying Patterns As An Airline

I thought that one of the interesting takeaways from my data would be to convert my airport visits into a theoretical airline’s hub network. The big five airlines in the United States of America (Alaska Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines) have a total average of nine hubs per airline. As such, I have decided to allocate Ajay Airlines nine hubs as well. In order to do this, I am going to designate my most frequented airports as hubs:

My top-visited airports in the United States

Given a sneak peek at the data, there is some allocation that needs to be done. Obviously, an airline would not have a hub at both Chicago O’Hare and Chicago Midway. Furthermore, an airline would also not likely have a hub at Willard Airport near Champaign, Illinois (although a puny five gate airport would make for an entertaining hub). Therefore, I decided to do some combinations based on metropolitan area and airport size.

The hub allocations end up being the following:

• Chicago O’Hare (127 total visits: ORD (105 visits) + MDW (15 visits) + CMI (7 visits))
• Philadelphia (61 visits)
• Raleigh (42)
• San Francisco (15: 12 (SFO) + 3 (SJC))
• Austin (14)
• Washington, DC/Baltimore (13: 4 (BWI) + 8(DCA) + 1 (IAD))
• Boston (8)
• New York-Kennedy (7: JFK (6) + EWR (1))
• Seattle (7)

A couple of interesting changes now that 2021 is in the books: since I moved to Austin in August, it has very much shot up the list of visits and is now very much an Ajay Airlines hub. As a result, our Los Angeles hub is swapped out with an Austin hub!

Disclaimer from 2020: I ended up merging Champaign’s airport with the Chicago metropolitan area just because Champaign is not that far outside of Chicago and I felt that it should not be left out of the calculation given that I had flown through Champaign more than I had Seattle, New York City, and Boston. In terms of tiebreakers for determining which hub would be ranked over another if there were the same amount of visits, I decided to place whichever airport I most recently visited first. This is JFK is ranked over Seattle, and why MIA is left out of the map altogether.

In 2020, I had written “even though I have traveled through a lot of places, I have not flown through Miami since 2002”. In 2021, I traveled through Miami twice, although I had traveled through Seattle in September on my way up to Alaska. If that trip had not taken place, Miami would be a hub instead of Seattle.

I also decided to replace the Baltimore hub with a hub at Washington, DC’s National Airport, because I have taken more trips through National than BWI (at the time of writing in 2020, I had visited BWI more than DCA).

Ajay Airlines’s hub network map now ends up looking like this:

The airline network has mostly coastal hubs (two on the West Coast and five on the East Coast), with the exception of its main hub at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and its new hub at Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Even with the hub swap from LAX to Austin, I would argue that Ajay Airlines is a direct competitor to American Airlines and its partner Alaska Airlines. With the exception of Boston Logan, all of Ajay Airlines’ hubs are either within a market that American/Alaska has a hub in or lie within 200 miles of a competitor hub (Raleigh and Austin are near Charlotte and Dallas). On the West Coast, Seattle and San Francisco are both Alaska and Ajay Airlines’ hubs (with LAX also being an American Airlines hub). Ajay Airlines’ busiest hub, ORD, is American’s main Midwestern hub. On the East Coast, Ajay Airlines shares its Philadelphia, New York-Kennedy, and Washington National hubs with American, and Ajay Airlines’ Raleigh hub (a former American Airlines hub) lies just 130 miles away from American’s Charlotte hub.

Based on how many times I have gone through these airports, however, my airline’s strategy actually wouldn’t play out exactly like American Airlines’ strategy. Rather, it would look something like this:

• Chicago O’Hare (ORD): would be utilized similarly to DFW in American’s network and ATL in Delta’s network. As the airline’s overwhelming hub with extensive connections, Ajay Airlines would utilize ORD as a gateway for heavy demand flights in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, and South America that would be supplemented by connections flying to and from O’Hare. ORD would also be used as a gateway to regional Midwestern and Great Plains destinations. In 2021, the Austin hub would take ORD’s more regional Texan flights.
• Philadelphia (PHL): would be utilized similar to PHL in American’s network and would provide extensive service up and down the East Coast and to heavy demand and seasonal European destinations, thus acting as the primary European hub.
• Raleigh (RDU): would be utilized similar to CLT in American’s network. RDU would act as a southeastern and Caribbean gateway (similar to Houston in United’s network) as well as a secondary European hub.
• San Francisco (SFO): would be utilized similar to SFO and DEN in United’s network. SFO acts as the main Western state hub as well as the primary Pacific hub, although in 2021, AUS will take some of its Western and Texan flights.
• Austin (AUS): would be utilizing similar to how American and Delta have been utilizing Austin as a mini focus city, combined with both international flights to neighboring countries and a couple premium European destinations for codeshares, as well as operations for Texas-based and central/Western United States-based flights. Unfortunately, AUS is too small of an airport to make a massive hub, but Ajay Airlines will invest significantly in the infrastructure of the airport to make it a fixture in worldwide flight operations.
• Washington-National (DCA): would be utilized similar to DCA and PHL in American’s network, acting as a hub for Northeastern destinations and operating shuttles to and from the nation’s capital.
• Boston (BOS): would be utilized similar to BOS in Delta’s network, acting as a small reliever hub for demand that cannot be fit at other surrounding hubs (in our case, ORD, PHL, and JFK). With the updated rankings in 2021, Ajay Airlines will invest in more European operations out of Boston than JFK.
• New York-Kennedy (JFK): would be utilized like JFK in American’s network, acting as a hub for high-demand transatlantic destinations and a connecting point to airline partners.
• Seattle (SEA): would be utilized similar to SEA in Alaska and Delta’s network, operating as the main Pacific Northwest hub.

In 2020, I had stated that “Realistically speaking, the airline’s hub network is way too coast-centric. If Ajay Airlines was actually real, shifting the Seattle hub and Boston hubs to more centrally located cities (such as Denver, Dallas, or Austin), would be a much better strategy.” This belief was, in fact, manifested in 2021, with an Austin hub joining Ajay Airlines and a coastal hub (Los Angeles) being closed down.

Shifting Back to the Real World: How Many Airports Have I Visited?

Since I was born, my estimate is that I have flown through Chicago O’Hare International Airport one hundred and five times. Because I have lived within fifteen minutes from ORD nearly my entire life, this makes a lot of sense, and as such, many of my flights originate or end at O’Hare. This can be seen quite well from my first graph, where the number of visits at O’Hare skyrockets the other sixty-two airports. Because of my recent move to Austin, I went from zero visits to Austin in 2020 to fourteen visits in 2021.

2021: I immediately started flying again two weeks after my second COVID vaccine and ended the year with thirty flights. While that is less than 2019, it is at the same pace of flights per week as 2019. I hope to fly even more in 2022!

From 2020: A vast chunk of my flying has come over the past five years. My flying habits remained somewhat steady during the first ten years of my life until the recession in 2008, when train travel became much cheaper for my family and me than plane travel. After 2015, plane travel became frequent in my life, and I had my most airport visits in 2019 when I traveled through an airport fifty times. 2020 was on pace to break that mark, with 18 visits in a span of just two months. However, with COVID-19 disrupting the airline industry, this unfortunately might not be the case.

Another data visualization that puts into perspective how much I travel is this chart that tracks how many new airports I visit per year. Prior to college, I usually would visit one new airport a year. When I went to college, this number spiked dramatically, with trips to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Europe, and India, and again in 2021, with trips to Wyoming and Alaska.

What Are My Flying Patterns? Where Do I Fly?

Similar to our first graph, we can see that O’Hare has the most linked destinations with 30 destinations (spread across three continents). Likewise, Philadelphia also comes in second with 12 destinations (spread across two continents). Austin is now third with 11.

O’Hare’s vast number of destinations is quite evident given its importance in the world’s aviation system as well as its distance to where I was living before I moved to Austin. From a map, we can see the diversity of ORD’s linked destinations:

from flightmapper.io

Honestly, not bad for twenty-four years of flying.

Conclusions

In 2020, I stated “I suspect, however, that a much bigger spike in airport visits will occur in the Washington, DC area as I eventually make my way towards moving over there. As a result, my visits to Philadelphia’s airport will decrease because I won’t fly from Washington to Philadelphia. This was actually seen last year, when I would take the Amtrak from DC to Delaware instead of flying through PHL.” This was almost the case, except I ended up moving to Austin instead and my visits to Philadelphia managed to increase as well.

I still travel way more often than the average person my age. If we look at data from Statista, the average American between the ages of 18–24 took 2.3 airplane trips in 2017. In 2021, I took thirty-five flights (essentially one flight a week since I began traveling in May, two weeks after dose 2).

I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to travel this year, both because the pandemic has shifted my work to being remote-first, and as a result, I can live and work from wherever while working on projects and with people I love. In addition, being able to build up a mileage portfolio over the years has provided tons of flexibility and options to go to new places. I cannot wait to see what the next year of travel will bring!

Hope you all enjoyed this!

Ajay