About FlightCancelRisk

FlightCancelRisk is an independent data project focused on U.S. flight disruption patterns.

We analyze publicly available U.S. DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) data to identify route-level cancellation and delay trends — particularly where disruption clusters persist over time.

The goal isn’t to declare airports “good” or “bad.” It’s to understand structure: where weather exposure, airspace complexity, hub centrality, and schedule density combine to make disruption more likely.

This site was built by a systems/data scientist who has a mild obsession with fragile networks, threshold effects, and why complex systems behave perfectly fine — until they very much don’t.

No hype. Just patterns.

We’re not a travel agency. We don’t sell tickets. We don’t predict the weather. We look at operational data and try to make it legible.

Large hubs offer more recovery options — but also more pathways for disruption to propagate. Smaller airports may be quieter — but less redundant. Context matters.

If you’re planning a trip, especially during high-stress periods like winter storms or spring break, understanding structural risk can help you make better decisions — or at least pack a little patience.

Methodology

Data comes from publicly available U.S. DOT BTS flight operations datasets. Current analyses reflect Nov 2024–Nov 2025 route-level cancellation data, including a high-cancellation subset used to identify recurring disruption thresholds.

We focus on recurring patterns rather than one-off incidents.

Because systems matter more than anecdotes.

Why This Exists

Because someone looked at a cancellation dataset and thought:

“Interesting.”

And then kept looking.