While browsing kaggle.com looking for interesting datasets to explore and practice my skills on, I've found one that caught my attention.

The topic is the landing statistics of San Francisco airport from 2005 to 2018. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been fascinated by aviation. I practised gliding for many years. This is why I smiled when I found out about this dataset.

After checking what the data records were and confirming the potential for exploration. I quickly plunged into it.

For this analysis, I chose to use Microsoft Excel, which is a powerful tool for analysis as it has the ability to quickly aggregate rows and identify patterns in the records.

Before starting the analysis, I uploaded the .csv file into Excel and discovered that some rows were incomplete. To solve this, I wrote a small VBA program to automatically delete the incomplete rows.

Now, having done that, we can start to read the data with a pivot table, generally used for its capacity to filter, for example.

Finding for the month in 2017 with the highest number of passengers at SFO airport

Our dataset contains records from 2005 to 2018. I randomly picked the year 2017 for our analysis and then deeper little by little.

As you can see, August is the busiest month with almost 20 000 movements. A month that rhymes with summer and the holiday season. In this context, it is interesting to note that July almost reaches the level of August.

Despite fluctuations in traffic patterns, the number of landings at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has remained constant over time. The lowest month is surprisingly February, with less than 150,000 landings.

To determine whether the airport was served by domestic or international flights in August 2017, I'm going to look more closely at the domestic or international records, as the dataset allows us to do.

Searching for the number of landings for each region in August 2017

The new chart reveals that domestic flights still dominate international flights by far in the same period.

This means that American citizens were most likely to travel to US destinations for their holidays. It is interesting to note that although San Francisco airport is listed as an international airport, the area is mainly used for domestic flights.

In conclusion, while San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has official international status, it primarily functions as a domestic hub serving numerous destinations within the United States. This is evidenced by passenger traffic trends in 2017, which showed that the majority of travellers flew to and from domestic locations, reinforcing its role as a key airport for domestic travel despite its global connections.