This summer I was allowed to take a look behind the scenes of Austrian Airlines. And I saw in their offices a program called "Goal-source-analysis" (Ziel-Quellen-Analyse).
In this program they see where people start their journey, when they are entering a Austrian flight and where they fly to.
One example (not real):
The flight OS121 VIE-FRA is operated by an A321.
They can see with the program that from the 190 pax:
23 pax came from IST with Turkish,
5 pax came from LJU with Adria,
19 pax came from KBP with Austrian,
8 pax came from SOF also with Austrian,
63 pax will fly to JFK with Lufthansa,
7 pax will fly to MAD with Lufthansa,
12 pax will fly to JNB with SAA and so on.
They also can see, that 10 pax from IST fly to JFK with the three Airlines above.
They also can calculate if a new flight will be feeded or will feed (probably, it's just statistics).
I think it would be a great tool for the game and make it more thrilling and more professional.
I agree that such depth of information would be great in AS.
BUT .... this kind of connection statistics (inbound/outbound) was said several times that under current setup is not possible, as there are no connection statistics and passenger connections are generated only during demand calculation, and they "live" for just couple of seconds while demand calculation takes place. Where the people fly (basically how demand calculation works) is a trade secret of AS. If AS divulged this information (how is demand calculated) it would mean players would know what planes to schedule from/where/when and the "intrigue" factor of AS would disappear.
So while I agree that such statistics would be great and would make this game more real, I do not foresee that we will see it any time soon, as that would mean filling huge databases with huge amount of data, writing of, and retrieval of, which would put enormous pressure on server resources. We have seen in recent days how just simple transit/airport statistics can bring the game to a crawl when database goes awry (goes on strike).