Following yesterday’s project with the Ryanair route data, I did the same for Aer Lingus this morning. I included one extra chart, mainly because of the northwest Atlantic destinations which are served by Dublin and Shannon and I wanted a view on how many airports service two routes.
So here are the charts.
Complete network
Airports serving at least 2 routes
Airports serving at least 3 routes.
So there are a couple of points to note about this. Both the Ryanair and Aer Lingus data were imported into Illustrator to build a web friendly file format (I exported the graphs as PDFs. I am primarily an expert in Photoshop rather than Illustrator so there are a few things I missed yesterday, which I could fix on today’s files particularly with respect to label positioning. I did this specifically for the second and third charts.
The underlying data have some similarities. For Aer Lingus, Dublin has something in the region of 80 destinations which is not that dissimilar to Ryanair’s offering. Aer Lingus flies out of a couple of extra airports, namely Belfast and Donegal but the routes concerne are limited – Belfast targets London at the moment, and Donegal targets Dublin. The other point to note about this data is that it includes destinations operated by either Aer Lingus, or Aer Lingus Regional (operated by Stobart) but not connecting destinations beyond their hubs in North America, for example. Direct flights only.
Just a brief comment on those airports with three or more routes outbound: they include the following:
- Cork
- Dublin
- Shannon
- London Gatwick
- London Heathrow
- Manchester
- Birmingham
- Bristol
- Edinburgh
- Lanzarote
- Malaga
- Faro
This is significantly UK focused compared to Ryanair which was highly holiday destination focused. I’m not saying you couldn’t go on your holidays in Manchester or Birmingham…but I suspect most people don’t.
I am not really finished with this project – I have a couple of other thoughts about it and I’d also like to look at combined connectivity out of Ireland across all airlines. That data is going to take a while to gather up and certain things I want to do I am not sure are possible using Gephi. I will also look at graphic decisions like the fonts and colours as well.