Database Delving for Aviation Geekery

A couple of months ago, I wondered: what was the first plane I flew internationally in?It’s an easier question to answer for me than for some; I didn’t take that flight until I was 26. On the other hand, it’s long enough ago that it predates pretty much all of the flight tracking websites - and anyway, they typically charge for anything much older than a week. It also predates my use of Gmail, and I never did get around to importing my archive.However, the US government - the DOT and more specifically the Bureau of Transportation Statistics - make available data on both international and domestic flight segments since 1990. It’s pipe delimited, which is a bit weird, but nothing some database utilities couldn’t handle, and so I rapidly had my candidate: Air India, which flew daily from Heathrow to New York (courtesy of what was called the “fifth freedom” - although it was between two countries that regulated air traffic heavily, it originated in India (either Delhi or Mumbai,…