Most Australian airports were busier during the last financial year than pre-pandemic, our analysis revealed, with FIFO workers in the west driving much of the demand.

The surpising increase came despite lockdowns grounding flights, decimating profits across the aviation industry and turning the country's busiest airports, like Sydney and Melbourne, into virtual mausoleums.

While the overall number of planes in the air has been drastically reduced, at many of the country's smaller airports, runways have been busier in FY20-21, the first since the arrival of COVID, than in 2019, the year that preceded it.

The uptick in flights across regional Western Australia has mirrored the buoyancy in the price of resources and the state's renewed appetite for mining exploration.

At Boolgeeda, the Pilbara airport which services Rio Tinto's Brockman 4 iron ore mine, Virgin is landing up to a dozen times a day at the moment.

Callion Airport, which sat disused in 2019, has welcomed hundreds of flights this year as Ora Banda ramps up its Davyhurst Gold Mine.

And traffic at Ravensthorpe, which services First Quantum's nickel mine west of Esperance, is this year already around 70 per cent above 2019 levels.

An analysis of data from flightaware.com shows they are among hundreds of Australian airports - most of them in regional WA - that have seen an increase in traffic during the pandemic.

The number of extra flights these airports are receiving are a fraction of those the industry has lost. But in WA, they reflect one of the big positives in the economy at large, and are one of the few glimmers of light in an otherwise gloomy time for aviation.

It's also been a small win for Perth Airport, the hub for most of these flights. Arrivals and departures have fallen less drastically there than at its major east coast counterparts.

Through parts of the pandemic, Perth has even had the busiest runways in the country. And while Sydney and Melbourne slumped to previously unthinkable lows, it notched up its busiest June for regional passenger numbers on record, the airport said.

Almost 4.5 million regional passengers passed through the airport in the last financial year, it said, an 11 per cent jump on the comparable period prior to the pandemic.

At the heart of this project is a very basic function that retrieves and saves the data for individual airports from a popular flight tracking service.

This can be accessed by running a query that references an airport four-letter International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code.

For Melbourne, for example, that means it requires YMML, rather than MEL, the three-letter IATA code that passengers to the airport will be familiar with.

After building this basic function, it meant the data collection process could then be automated, making it quick, efficient and repeatable.

To do that though, access to all the country's ICAO codes would be required.

Automating the data collection

Australia has more than 1700 airports spread across the continent, many of the remote and infrequently used.

A comprehensive list showing each of these airports and their relevant details was found in an HTML table at fallingrain.com, and downloaded with a similar function to the one above, though this time built to extract data from HTML tables.

This produced a table containing 1589 ICAO codes. More than a hundred airports that are either too small to have a listed code or are listed as being closed were excluded from the list.

These codes code then be fed into the getTrafficByIcao function, one by one, with a CSV of each set of results saved separately.

Analysing the data then produced the surprising result that just over half the country's airports had experienced an increase in traffic.

Data for 2019 and FY20 could be found for over 1,000 airports (excluding those with no traffic in either period).

Of these, 505 saw an increase in traffic for the two periods, though as the histogram below shows, the changes were often marginal when compared to the losses.

Read more at GitHub

How do illustrate a trend in traffic data when the numbers are so vastly different and disproportionate?

One approach was to focus on the details, to compare like with like, and to normalise the data, such as in the sparklines above.

At the other end of the scale, comparing major airports -- which are regional hubs -- indirectly told the story of their state's smaller airfields, as well as how they compared against other major hubs.

The map-style scatter line-scatter above showing traffic over a week in which Melbourne was locked down highlighted how quiet the city had become - and also how much 'base-level' traffic still went through the airport.

Borrowing the idea of 'box-scatter' plots from Bloomberg, we could illustrated how the losses dwarfed the gains, while a Marimekko chart put a different perspective on how significant the changes were.

Updating the figures for 2023, and comparing its April with that of 2019, also showed that the country's major airports are still behind where they were, a form of "long COVID" that suggest international travellers are reluctant to come to a country which so was so ruthless with its border closures.