Flight delays, in one paragraph

flight-delays in one paragraph, for anyone deciding whether it is worth downloading.

8,000 rows, 10 columns, one row per scheduled flight. Eight thousand domestic flights across six carriers and fourteen airports, with departure and arrival delay, cancellations, and a delay distribution that is long-tailed rather than normal.

Every dataset here is synthetic, which is a deliberate trade. It costs realism and buys three things: we can ship it CC0 with no licence trap, we can bake in the exact quirk a lesson needs, and nobody's real records end up in a tutorial.

Something to try: Show why the mean and median delay disagree, with a histogram. The SQL playground has it loaded already, and the data explorer will profile every column in one pass if you would rather look before you query.

select *
from flight_delays
limit 20;

The file is generated from a fixed seed, so the CSV you download today is byte-identical to the one from last year. That matters more than it sounds: it means a lesson can say "row 412 is the interesting one" and still be right in eighteen months.

Download it, break it, keep it. CC0 — no attribution required, no account, no email.