A global business? Mapping the densest passenger airline routes

The airline business is largely perceived, narrated and advertised as a global business dominated by intercontinental flights and wide-body aircraft. Aviation and globalisation are intimately cross-connected, but most readers would agree they usually fly within their own country or macro-region and aboard a narrow-body aircraft. The following contribution aims to introduce the geography of the main passenger airline routes to analyse how global the airline business actually is. The rationale for investigating main links is to help to “read the world” and to highlight key interactions between places. The data the author considers, which were extracted from the OAG 2018 database, relate to the capacity (namely, the number of seats) supplied by airlines on regular passenger flights. It is thus not affected by the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Data cover the whole year so there are no seasonality-related issues. Multiple airports belonging to a same city were merged so that the data eventually fit to the inter-city level. This involved 30,412 city-pairs worldwide, which were ranked by the decreasing volume of seats. The author then decided to keep the first quintile (i.e. the city-pairs whose cumulative number of seats reaches 20% of global seat capacity). This top 20% left only 301 city-pairs, ranging from 15.57 million (Seoul-Jeju-Seoul) to 2.24 million seats a year (Bangkok–Surat Thani–Bangkok). Apart from the expensive OAG dataset, these routes were mapped using free, open-source software (QGIS) and resources (OpenFlights for airports’ location and Natural Earth for countries, oceans and graticules). After Hsu and Voxland (1991), a Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area projection was applied so the lands form a ring, here around the North Pole. Other centres are possible, but most of the landmasses, the largest airports and densest airline routes are in the Northern Hemisphere. Finally, air links were generated as great-circle lines, i.e. the shortest routes. It is known that planes do not fly the shortest routes and that the average detour is 7.6%. As a result, the map is likely close to the actual pathways in most cases.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102941
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692320310188
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/09666923
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Dobruszkes, Frédéric
• Publication Date: 2021-4

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Maps; References;
• Pagination: 102941
• Serial:
  • Journal of Transport Geography
  • Volume: 92
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0966-6923
  • Serial URL: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air routes; Air travel; Civil aviation; Data analysis; Mapping
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01772100
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: May 21 2021 10:57AM