New Study Shows How Aviation Has Shaped Global Connectivity Since 1990

A new MIT study charts a global air-connectivity increase of 140 percent over 22 years.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a new model that shows to which degree regions around the world are connected through air transportation.

The researchers, at MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment (LAE), analyzed flight schedules between 1990 and 2012 from more than 1,100 airlines that connected to 4,600 airports around the world. The researchers also examined 1.2 million tickets to gauge passenger behavior — such as detours passengers were willing to make to get to their final destination.

In 1990, airports in the U.S. were, by far, the best connected. But by 2012, thousands of airports worldwide, especially in Europe and Asia, emerged as access points in the air network, increasing global connectivity, or the links between regions, by 140 percent, the study found.

Researchers said the growth in global connectivity is due to increasing availability and quality of indirect connections, where passengers switch to connecting flights to reach their final destination.

While flyers generally prefer nonstop over one-stop flights, researchers said the number and quality of indirect connections grew faster than nonstop flights during the 22-year period studied, thanks to increasing cooperation between airlines.

Between 1990 and 2012, global airlines paired up into multi-airline alliances in order to offer “code-sharing” flights — connecting flights involving two airlines and sold to passengers on a single ticket.

“Even if you take into account that one-stop flights have a lower value for passengers because they involve additional travel time, we still find that one-stop flights become more important over time in connecting regions,” said Robert Malina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and LAE’s associate director in a press release.

“It’s easier to transfer these days, because the airlines are cooperating better than they were in the ’90s. So we get a lot of indirect connectivity. That’s a striking result,” Malina said.

The study, co-authored by Malina, MIT postdoc Florian Allroggen and PhD student Michael Wittman, was published in the journal Transportation Research Part E and funded, in part, by the German Research Foundation and MIT’s Airline Industry Consortium.

“It’s an interesting time period, because there was a lot of change in the global transportation network,” Malina said. “Let’s take Europe as an example: Back in the early 1990s, you had highly regulated markets. So if you were an Irish airline, you were able to fly from Ireland to other countries, but you were not able to offer services from Spain to Germany, for example.”

The study found that in 1990, global nonstop and one-stop connectivity was most prevalent in North American airports. But by 2012, this concentration dropped as European and Asian countries opened up aviation markets to better integrate into the global air transport network.

“During this period, we particularly observed the rise of Asia,” Malina says. “Airports like Dubai and Beijing in the 1990s played no role whatsoever in generating global connectivity, and now they’ve become more important.”

[Photo: iStock]