Global Airline Flight Schedules and Projections from 1978

OAG Aviation Worldwide LLC provides projections of commercial airline flight schedules worldwide from 1978 to 2025. The dataset describes flight characteristics including departure and arrival airports, flight times, carrier, fares, and capacity. Projections are updated at the beginning of each month (1979-1987) or year (1987 onward).

Use Cases

• Analyze carrier market share and route competition using scheduled flight frequency and capacity data.
• Model airport congestion and infrastructure needs by aggregating projected departure and arrival times.
• Forecast passenger demand and optimize pricing strategies using historical fare projections.
• Study the evolution of global aviation networks over time using origin and destination airport pairs.

Strengths

• 47-year temporal coverage from 1978 to 2025.
• Global spatial coverage of commercial airline schedules.
• Includes multiple projected features per flight such as times, fares, and capacity.

Limitations

• Data consists of projections, not actual flown flight records, which may differ from reality.
• Sample size and row count are unknown, limiting assessment of statistical power.
• Early data (1979-1987) is monthly but later data is annual, creating temporal granularity inconsistency.

Provenance

Source

OAG Aviation Worldwide LLC, a commercial aviation data provider.

Collection Method

Projections of airline schedules created at the beginning of each update period.

Time Range

1978 to 2025.

Freshness

Projections updated monthly or annually; dataset last updated in March 2026.

Geography

Worldwide.