Every flight
leaves a trace.

Every extra minute of schedule buffer or ground-crew staffing costs the airline money. Every minute short of it risks a delay that cascades into the next rotation. The question is never "more or less" — it's which minutes are actually worth it.

This models a real turnaround as what it actually is: a chain of dependent tasks — deboarding, cabin clean, catering, fueling, baggage, boarding — each with its own realistic timing and variability. Run it enough times and a clear, actionable picture forms of exactly where a station's time and staffing are best spent.

An airline gets thousands of survey responses and still can't answer the only question that matters: which part of the operation is costing us the score?

Six filters — flight number, cabin, gate, agent, aircraft type, issue category — recompute every KPI and chart live, tying sentiment back to the operational facts behind it: delays, service touchpoints, check-in performance.

Everyone in operations knows bird strikes feel seasonal. This tested whether the pattern is real — and it is. Summer and fall carry significantly more strikes, at p < 0.001.

That turns a hunch into a staffing and mitigation schedule. If risk concentrates in two seasons, wildlife management and crew briefings should too.

Weather gets blamed for most delays. Nineteen years of the government's own data says the bigger factor, most years, is simpler: the previous flight on the same tail running late.

A quick look at what the numbers actually show — and the case for why buffer and staffing, not the forecast, are usually the more useful thing to plan around.

The standard airline survey fires once, by email, after arrival, and asks for a 1–10 score and a wall of text. Passengers only remember the extremes.

So the data comes back with the middle of the journey missing. You learn the flight was bad. You don't learn it was the gate change, the bag drop queue, or the boarding call nobody heard.

The fix: replace one long survey with micro-surveys at each touchpoint — two questions and an optional comment, delivered where the moment actually happened.