@pipeworx/bts-ontime

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Tools: 5

US domestic airline on-time performance and delay causes: monthly on-time %, average arrival delay, cancellations, diversions, and delay minutes broken down by cause (carrier, weather, air-traffic-control/NAS, security, late aircraft) — by route, by carrier, and by arrival airport. Fleet #2953.

Tools

• route_ontime(origin, dest, carrier?, months?) — monthly on-time performance for one origin->destination route, optionally scoped to one carrier. Each month carries flights, completed flights, on-time arrivals and on-time %, average arrival delay, cancellations, diversions, and delay minutes by cause.
• carrier_ontime(carrier, airport?, months?) — the same monthly shape, aggregated across one airline’s whole network (or just the flights touching one airport).
• bts_airport_delays(airport, year?, month?, limit?, offset?) — delay-cause breakdown by carrier for flights ARRIVING at one airport, optionally scoped to a year and/or month. limit defaults to 50 (max 200); a response with more matching rows than returned carries truncated: true and total_matching rather than silently dropping them.
• delay_causes(year, carrier?, airport?, limit?, offset?) — the same delay-cause rows, organized by year first, for scanning a whole year across carriers or airports. Same limit/truncated/total_matching pagination as bts_airport_delays.
• list_coverage() — the earliest/latest month actually loaded, and when. Call this first if you’re not sure a given period is covered.

Carrier accepts either the 2-letter reporting-carrier code ("DL") or a common airline name ("Delta"). Airport codes are validated against what is actually loaded (not a static list) — an unrecognized code is refused with a clear error, never an empty success.

Auth

Keyless. The tools answer only through the Pipeworx gateway, which holds the data; a standalone npm install has no data to read, and every tool throws a clear “not bound in this runtime” error there instead of returning an empty list.

Data sources

• US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), TranStats — “Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance” monthly bulk data. US federal government work: public domain (17 U.S.C. §105). The agency publishes bulk files only (no live query API for this dataset), so this pack builds a copy (scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs) rather than proxying — raw flight-level rows (~600k/month) are never stored; the loader aggregates each month down to two small tables and discards the raw file before moving to the next one.

What delay_cause is, and is not

BTS separately publishes its own “Airline Delay Cause” product, which apportions each delayed flight’s minutes into fractional per-cause counts via a methodology this pack does not reimplement. The delay_cause table here is derived from the same underlying per-flight delay-minute fields (carrier/weather/NAS/security/late-aircraft) as route_month, rolled up by carrier x arrival-airport x month, and reported as minute sums, not fractional counts. It will be consistent with BTS’s own published cause breakdown but is not guaranteed to match it row-for-row — this is one pipeline over one raw source, not a second download of BTS’s own aggregate.

Known gaps — read before extending this pack

Coverage is the most recent months as of the load, not full history. BTS’s bulk-file server throttles hard per connection — one file download measured ~170 seconds regardless of a modest concurrency increase helping (3 concurrent downloads of this upstream finished in about the same wall time as 1 serial one, measured 2026-10-12), so pulling the full 1987-present archive (400+ monthly files) in one sitting is a multi-hour job, not a pack-build step. This first load covers the most recent 12 months as of 2026-10-12 (call list_coverage for the exact range) for BOTH tables — there is no separate 2003-onward backfill for delay_cause in this commit; it is derived from the same months as route_month.

Extending coverage is mechanical, not research — see “Refreshing or extending the data” below. Re-running the loader with a larger --months (and a --concurrency tuned to be polite to the upstream) pulls further back; nothing about the schema or the tools changes.

Refreshing or extending the data

node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --months 12                 # default: most recent 12 months
node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --months 36 --concurrency 4 # extend further back
node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --through 2026-7            # pin the "latest" month instead of probing

Needs wrangler logged in to the Pipeworx Cloudflare account. Each run replaces route_month, delay_cause and bts_ontime_meta (DROP + reload) rather than appending — BTS’s own monthly files are themselves revised occasionally, so a clean reload is the only way to be sure stale rows from a withdrawn/corrected file don’t linger. A monthly refresh (BTS publishes with a roughly 2-month lag) should re-run this with a --months large enough to cover the gap since the last load, not just 12, or the oldest previously-loaded months will quietly drop off the window.

Tools

• route_ontime — Monthly on-time %, average delay and delay causes for one origin->destination route.
• carrier_ontime — Monthly on-time %, average delay and delay causes for one airline, system-wide or at one airport.
• bts_airport_delays — Delay-cause breakdown by carrier for arrivals at one airport.
• delay_causes — Year-scoped delay-cause rows, optionally filtered by carrier and/or airport.
• list_coverage — Earliest/latest BTS month loaded, and when.