Australian aviation activity & economic indicators
auflights is an R data package containing a collection of Australian aviation datasets, including domestic routes, international airline activity, air fares, CPI, and exchange rates. It is designed for teaching, exploratory analysis and visualisation.
Included datasets
The package provides the following cleaned & documented datasets:
| Dataset | Description |
|---|---|
| au_dom_routes | Monthly domestic city-pair flights, seats, and passengers (2016–2025) from BITRE. |
| au_int_airlines | Monthly international flights & passengers inbound/outbound by city-pair and airline (2016–2025). |
| au_int_routes | Disaggregated international city-pair routing from BITRE. |
| airfares_domestic | Domestic airfare indices (business & economy). |
| cpi | Consumer Price Index (ABS). |
| exchange_rates | RBA exchange rate historical series. |
Raw Excel files are stored in data-raw/original/, and cleaned .rda files are stored in data/.
Example: domestic route analysis
library(auflights)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
au_dom_routes |>
filter(origin_city == "Sydney", year >= 2019) |>
group_by(year) |>
summarise(passengers = sum(n_passengers, na.rm = TRUE)) |>
ggplot(aes(year, passengers)) +
geom_line() +
labs(title = "Sydney outbound passengers (2019–2025)") +
scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::label_comma()) +
theme_bw() +
theme(aspect.ratio = 1)
Example: international inbound passengers by country
in_passengers <- au_int_airlines |>
group_by(country) |>
summarise(inbound = sum(n_passengers_in, na.rm = TRUE)) |>
arrange(desc(inbound)) |>
slice_head(n = 10)
kableExtra::kable(in_passengers)| country | inbound |
|---|---|
| New Zealand | 27249699 |
| Singapore | 21602843 |
| United Arab Emirates | 13327142 |
| Indonesia | 12132675 |
| USA | 10773639 |
| China | 10316992 |
| Malaysia | 9100647 |
| Hong Kong (SAR) | 8304588 |
| Japan | 5528996 |
| Thailand | 5424765 |
Data sources
BITRE – Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics Domestic & International Airline Activity https://www.bitre.gov.au
ABS – Australian Bureau of Statistics CPI indices https://www.abs.gov.au
Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Exchange rates (F11 series) https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/
All data is public and reproducible.