After Oct. 30th, 2013, Alaska Airlines began to charge passengers $25 each for the first and second checked bags, so a lot more passengers started to carry their bags on the flight. Since then passengers constantly experienced flight delay due to the fact that too many carry-on bags cannot be stowed in the limited overhead bins. If the approximate number of “problematic” carry-on bags of each flight can be known in advance, Alaska Airline can prepare much earlier to avoid flight delay.

Based on the flight and baggage data from August 2013 to February 2014, our project right there to help solve this problem. We identify several interesting patterns from the data, like the flights to Canada have more “problematic” carry-on bags than others, and furthermore we design a statistic model for predicting the approximate number of bags which should be claimed at the gate to avoid the delay problem.