You are a manager in an airline company, AirGlide, which is planning to enter into European market. AirGlide has operated within North America, with several destinations. They have a track record of being in

You are a manager in an airline company, AirGlide, which is planning to enter into European market. AirGlide has operated within North America, with several destinations. They have a track record of being in the top 5 most punctual North American airlines.

AirGlide has planned to set its operational base in the UK and to start several routes across Europe from that base. We assume that they have deep pockets to cover the costs and achieve break-even in no more than four years. You can make additional assumptions on your own as long as they are logical and consistent with the information provided in this brief, and are clearly articulated in your submitted report.

The big question to investigate is:

Which airport in the UK would be most suited as the operational base?

You are provided with an open dataset containing information on all flights in and out of the UK from 2018 to 2023. As a part of this assessment, it is expected that students will identify other data sources that can help improve the decision-making process. As an example, an open access data on UK weather stations is provided that might help analysing the performance of different airports under different weather conditions.

 In order to answer this big question, you must demonstrate your skills in the following areas:

• Data Understanding: Inspect the data provided with the case study. To demonstrate your critical
  thinking, identify and suggest additional sources of data that are not provided but can help investigate this big question.
• Data Preparation: Performing operations like filtering, sorting, transformation, and enrichment to make data more useful and information-rich before analysing them.
•  Exploratory Analysis: Calculate basic statistics, create visualizations (charts, graphs) to represent key trends, seasonal variations, and to identify any outliers.
• Managerial Insights: Provide insights derived from your analysis. For example, structured analysis of available airports and their feasibility scores for different criteria (e.g. structured decision tables, cost-benefit analysis etc.)
• Recommendations: Formulate actionable recommendations for setting up an operational base in the UK