This chart shows yearly-maximum of arrival-delay-time of 8 major carrier companies from 1987 to 2008. The legend is clickable so please try it out.
Over the twenty years period, the yearly-max of arrival-delay-time showed increasing trend, more or less, for all these carriers. The pattern of this increasing are different though: For example, the WN showed a gradual but steady increase, the US and DL started to increase around year 2000, while AA showed a step increase from 1987 to 1988 and then kept flat for the rest of the time.
I downloaded the csv files of each year from stat-computing.org and then used some R codes to find out the yearly-max of arrival delay from each carrier. Then I exported the new data set, which is much smaller now, to a csv file-YearlyMaxTotal.csv. I made this interactive chart with D3.js and used css code to fine tune some details of the html page.
This historic flight data set is huge and there are many other ways to explore the data. I bet there are some stories that are even more interesting to tell. That's what I will be working on next.