SkyScraper

A desktop app for exploring U.S. commercial flight datasets — load a CSV from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, see where the flights go on a map, and slice them by carrier, route, date, time, and status.

Features

• Albers-USA map with state outlines and airport dots. Heatmap colours states by volume of flights.
• Search — carrier/origin/destination cascade together; date range; time; cancelled/diverted toggles.
• Per-flight details showing scheduled vs actual times with signed-minute delay deltas, badges for cancelled/diverted.
• Drill-ins: click a dot → destination graph for that airport; click a bar → table of flights for that origin→destination pair.
• Drag-and-drop any flights CSV onto the window; recents menu remembers the last 5.
• Keyboard-friendly navigation — Esc returns to the previous scene.

Downloads

Portable bundles per platform on the Releases page — Linux AppImage, macOS .app, Windows folder.

Or build from source (Java 24 + JavaFX 24): ./mvnw javafx:run. A bundled flights_sample.csv (~2,000 rows, January 2022) loads launch.

Data

The app reads BTS Marketing Carrier On-Time Performance CSVs (US Department of Transportation; one row per US commercial flight, monthly, since January 2018).

A 2,000-flight sample (flights_sample.csv) ships with the repo.

Loading more data from BTS

1. Open https://www.transtats.bts.gov → Data Finder → Aviation → Airline On-Time Performance Data → Marketing Carrier On-Time Performance (Beginning January 2018).

2. Tick exactly these 18 fields

   Section	Field
   Time Period	FlightDate
   Airline	IATA_Code_Marketing_Airline
   Airline	Flight_Number_Marketing_Airline
   Origin	Origin
   Origin	OriginCityName
   Origin	OriginState
   Origin	OriginWac
   Destination	Dest
   Destination	DestCityName
   Destination	DestState
   Destination	DestWac
   Departure Performance	CRSDepTime
   Departure Performance	DepTime
   Arrival Performance	CRSArrTime
   Arrival Performance	ArrTime
   Cancellations and Diversions	Cancelled
   Cancellations and Diversions	Diverted
   Flight Summaries	Distance

3. Pick a year/month under the geography/year/period filters, click Download.

4. Open the resulting CSV in the app via Open dataset or drag and drop it into the window

Tech stack

• Java 24, JavaFX 24
• ControlsFX
• OpenCSV
• Maven build · jpackage app-image distribution
• TopoJSON state outlines from us-atlas
• Airport coordinates from OurAirports

License