The busiest airline route is between Seoul and a city you probably never knew before:
Being an avid airline junkie I have always bean fascinated by airline networks and how they change and adapt over time. Since someone last semester covered on the basic structure of a singular airline network I will try not to belabor the point and instead focus on how different airline’s route networks interact over time. The basic point of this piece is to look at how airlines compete with each other by overlapping their respective route networks.
One special case that has not bean touched on before is the idea of Strong vs Weak ties. If we look at a map that contains all of the air routes together we can view the stronger ties as those with the most frequency of flights per day. The strongest ties tend to occur when a country’s largest cities or tourist areas are located approximately ninety minutes flying time from other major population centers. If we look at the most frequented flight cycles they turn out to be from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo, Tokyo to Sapporo, and Seoul to Jeju (a resort town off the coast of Korea). What are missing from these strong ties are long distance routes that people may often associate with busy travel sectors such as NY to LA or London.
While these routes may not be the most traveled they would most closely follow another concept that we learned in class: local bridges. Often long haul flights connect an airline’s route network on one continent, let’s says United, with another one on the other side of the world, lets take its partner airline Turkish Airlines. Both United and Turkish Airlines partner to allow someone coming from say Ithaca to connect to destinations that would be unreachable otherwise, say Izmir Turkey. The local bridge that would exist between these airline’s hubs would be from Chicago and Istanbul for example. Local bridges are integral in the aviation industry as they allow the earth to connect.
With fierce competition there are few places in the world where bridges exist rather than strictly local bridges. The few places on earth that are almost cut off form civilization are remote fields in the Alaskan and Canadian wilderness where bush pilots connect to a central field and then connect to a larger town. The most extreme case of a local bridge can be seen in LATAM flight 800. This daily flight from Auckland to Santiago is the only connection between South America to Oceania. Once a day only one flight traverses the Southern Atlantic Ocean compared to the hundreds of flights that take the ‘hop’ over the pond. (Trans-Atlantic)
Until recently airlines used to compete spartanly from one another. They now form alliances to intertwine their networks to compete for customers finding which airlines are the most connected. Applying the information we learned in Networks we can learn more about the dynamic airline industry. For additional resources and reading I have attached websites with historical route networks, along with articles about the modern aviation industries’ networks.
Useful Recourses
How United Airlines decides how to grow their route networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_cO9xmpEQ
A Database of all aviation routes
http://www.airlineroutemaps.com
A website that tracks when new routes on networks open and close
http://www.routesonline.com/news/38/airlineroute
Historical Route Maps
http://airwaysnews.com/html/timetable-and-route-maps
Finally some references to figures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_air_routes