schnirz

Which book would that be, out of interest?

This. While reading the post, I wondered when he'd mention something about spatial databases or spatial indexes.

do you happen to know whether internal schedules for airport and/or carrier operations are ever published? It would be really interesting to know how much slack is built into these schedules to recover from delays.

I'm not sure I understand why you felt that you need to remove seasonality if you already have weather information as features for your model. Isn't season usually just used as a proxy for weather? If you have all the weather data you need (temperature, precipitation rate, type of precipitation, etc.), it seems a little weird that you subsequently only train the model on short time series to "remove the effect of seasonality".