A Complex Network Analysis of the United States Air Transportation

The air transportation industry has a great impact on the economy. In this paper, we analyze the air transportation network in the U.S. to better understand its characteristics. For this, we measure several complex network features including average shortest path, degree distribution, assortative mixing, clustering, betweenness centrality, and resiliency. We also analyzed changes over the previous two decades and compared the networks with earlier air transportation network studies. In our analysis, we did not observe considerable changes in the analyzed complex network features of the U.S. air transportation over the past two decade. Moreover, the U.S. air transportation network exhibits small world characteristics and has an assortative mixing by the degree similar to the earlier study on the world-wide air transportation network. However, the US air transportation network exhibits a partial power law degree distribution unlike the complete power law reported in earlier air transportation networks.