About RouteRanking

I fly Dublin to London regularly. Sick of delays, I stopped guessing which flights were most likely to leave on time and started tracking. Sixty days of data gave me that answer. RouteRanking was built to share that answer with anyone flying the same routes.

What RouteRanking does

RouteRanking tracks historical on-time performance for every flight on Irish and UK regional routes, so you can compare all flights on a route side by side and pick the one most likely to arrive on time. Unlike FlightAware or FlightStats, which show individual flight stats, RouteRanking lets you see every flight on a route ranked by on-time percentage in one place.

Methodology

• Data source: Flight history is sourced from historical flight logs, outlining departure and arrival times for each flight on a route.
• On-time definition: A flight is counted as on-time if it arrives within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time. Early arrivals always count as on-time.
• Cancellations: Cancelled and diverted flights are excluded from on-time calculations entirely, in line with industry standards (DOT, Eurocontrol). They are not counted as late.
• Incomplete data: Flights where no actual arrival time is available, for example flights still in progress at the time of data collection, are excluded from calculations rather than assumed on-time.
• Codeshares: Codeshare flights are filtered out at both the discovery and ingestion stages, so each physical flight is counted only once.
• Minimum sample size: A flight number must have at least 30 scorable observations before it appears in results. This ensures percentages are statistically meaningful rather than based on a handful of flights.
• Rolling window: All calculations use a 60-day rolling window of historical data, updated nightly.
• Weighted averages: Route-level averages are weighted by each flight's sample size, so flights with more observations carry more weight in the overall route score.

Data freshness

The dataset is updated nightly via an automated sync. All on-time percentages reflect the most recent 60 days of flight history.

A note on accuracy

On-time performance can vary with seasons, weather events and schedule changes. RouteRanking reflects historical patterns. Past performance is a useful guide, not a guarantee of future punctuality.

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