There's controversy about the increasing number of airline delays in the United States and around the world.  While there is considerable speculation about how delays are caused or compounded by weather and traffic volume, little has been done to study these correlations.  

The FAA created a Consolidated Operations and Delay Analysis System (CODAS)  to combine several government databases, which tabulate delays during various phases of flight.  While this data is useful for answering questions about the degree and magnitude of delays related to weather and airspace capacity, it is not in a format that can be immediately consolidated, sorted and  analyzed.

Air Economics (Flt Tech Online's parent) has placed three years (January 98 – December 2000) of CODAS data into a Microsoft Access database.  This new tool, called AvDAT, allows an analyst to easily manipulate CODAS data.  Using AvDAT, Air Economics  constructed several datasets available in easy- to-use Excel spreadsheets.  A sample of these datasets are available for immediate download. In addition, customized datasets may be requested, or the entire Access database may be delivered via CD-ROM.