Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117

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Journal of Transport Geography

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Network analysis of Chinas aviation system, statistical and spatial structure

Jingyi Lin
Department of Urban Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Aviation systems are less geographically constrained compared to ground transportation because their
Complex network routes are not so affected by geographical conditions. For this reason, aviation systems are endowed to
Transportation some extent with a distinctive network topology and spatial pattern. In this article, the statistical features
Spatial distance of Chinas aviation system (CAS) are investigated through a complex network approach by examining
Gravitation law
weekly ight patterns. The correlation study proves the existence of a spatial hierarchical structure
China
within Chinas aviation network, which implies a more complex spatial mechanism. Subsequently the
spatial structure of CAS is explored based on the ight distances between airport cities. In light of three
measurements of node strength, population and GDP, It has been decided that the spatial effect of Chinas
aviation system should be analyzed separately in term of different distance scales. Only for medium- and
long-distance travel, the ight patterns conform to a gravitation law; therefore, the distance dependence
function can be generalized as a scaling relationship. In summary, from a complex network angle, this
paper provides preliminary but enlightening insights to understanding the unique spatial mechanism
of aviation systems.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction and spatial characteristics of Chinas aviation system is of the ut-

In our modern information lled society, aviation networks are
becoming an essential part of public transportation systems due to
their convenience and efciency. However, these complex systems
could easily be affected by various historic, political, economic and
geographical factors. Beginning with the passage of the Airline
Deregulation Act in the United States in 1978, the spirit of nonin-
terference in the aviation industry has been sweeping the world
and creating profound effects worldwide. As the most populous
country in the world, China also proposed airline reform and dere-
gulations in the 1980s, which produced numerous changes in the
airline industry. From 1980 to 2009, the average annual growth
rate of Chinas civil aviation was around 17.6%. In the same period,
the number of airports had grown from 77 to 166, which increased
annual trafc volume from 3.43 million to 230 million. In contrast
to the market-oriented liberalized environment in the US or Eur-
ope, macro controls from the government have always played an
important role in Chinas aviation industry. The airline consolida-
tion in 2002, to relieve negative effects caused by competition
among carriers during the deregulation process, is just one exam-
ple. Hence, Chinas aviation system has evolved with its unique
mechanism and structure. In this context, exploring the statistical
Address: Drottning Kristinas vg 30, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Tel.: +46
087907342; fax: +46 08 790 8580.
E-mail address: jingyil@kth.se
most interest and importance for researchers.
Generally speaking, the structure of airline systems would be
directly affected by state policies. As the rst country to attempt
deregulation of the airline industry, many important lessons from
the US experiences over the last three decades have been exten-
sively discussed (Chou, 1993; Bowen, 2002; Goetz and Vowles,
2009). Added to this is the commercialization of the airline indus-
try and development of low-cost carriers in some European coun-
tries (Dobruszkes, 2006; Ison et al., 2011). The hub-and-spoke
network has been widely adopted in the liberalization process. In
this sense, how to increase the hub centrality and optimize the net-
work structure is critical for carriers to survive (Fleming and Hay-
uth, 1994; Bowen, 2002; OConnor, 2003). The evolution and
efciency of airline systems in some Southeast Asian countries
have also been studied by geographers due to their different pat-
terns of development (Bowen and Leinbach, 1995; OConnor,
1995; Bowen, 2000). In recent years, Chinas dramatic growth in
the airline industry has earned much attention from researchers
(Wang, 2005; Wang and Jin, 2007). The whole reform process from
a state-owned sector to a prot-seeking industry can be divided
into phases based on several signicant events (Shen, 1992; Zhang,
1998; Zhang and Chen, 2003; Zhang and Round, 2008; Shaw et al.,
2009). During the consolidation phase, which was marked by the
airline consolidation led by the Civil Aviation Administration of
China (CAAC) in 2002, the current network structure of Chinas
aviation system was preliminarily shaped (Jin et al., 2005; Lei
and OConnell, 2011). Shaw et al. (2009) compared the network

0966-6923/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2011.12.002
110 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
structure and airline competition of different individual carriers
before and after the consolidation. They also pointed out that,
the Chinese government-led consolidation created three airlines
that had similar geographic coverage but chose distinct hubs to
avoid direct competition among them. This system made it easier
for Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to develop their own interna-
tional airline hubs as a result of the consolidation strategy, which
in turn heightened their international competitiveness (Ma and
Timberlake, 2008; Lei and OConnell, 2011).
Network analysis is an old method used in transport geography
to analyze the structure of transport systems (Kansky, 1963; Taaffe
et al., 1996). Jin et al. (2004) studied the evolution of network
structures in 19801998 using domestic air passenger data in
China, and further concluded that a hub-and-spoke network had
been developed (Jin et al., 2005). Shaw et al. (2009) also computed
the direct connection index and the shortest-path-connection
index to assess network accessibility. Nevertheless, this topic be-
gan to garner extensive attention from other disciplines after the
popularity of Complex Network Theory in the past decade. Com-
plex network analysis provides a novel and comprehensive view-
point to study both the topological and geometric structure of
transport systems. An urban bus network in China (Lu and Shi,
2007), the Indian railway system (Sen et al., 2003) and the Seoul
subway system (Lee et al., 2008) all present small world effects
or scale-free distributions, meanwhile the parameters are dis-
cussed to some extent. Much larger samples, for example, 22 pub-
lic transportation networks in Poland (Sienkiewicz and Hoyst,
2005), 14 worldwide public transportation networks (Ferber
et al., 2009), even street networks in 40 US cities (Jiang, 2007) con-
sistently indicate that transportation systems possess the charac-
teristics of complex networks. Similar results also apply for
aviation systems. The worldwide airport network exhibits a
scale-free property and small-world structure with an average
path length of around four (Guimer et al., 2005). Besides, many
national airline networks, such as those of India, China and United
States, all exhibit smaller average path lengths ranging from 2.067
to 2.4, as well as two-regime power-law degree distributions (Li
and Cai, 2004; Liu and Zhou, 2007; Bagler, 2008; Xu and Harriss,
2008; Wang et al., 2011).
Nevertheless, these pieces, from a complex network perspective,
focus less on spatial structures than topological features. Only
Rabasz and Barabasi (2003) mentioned some networks present a
hierarchical structure, while the distance driven networks, such
as power grids do not. A few years later, Liu and Zhou (2007) no-
ticed the hierarchical architecture of Chinas aviation network and
concluded that spatial impacts on it are negligible. Unfortunately
there has been no follow up of systematic research until recently,
when the spatial distance dependence of social interactions was
established as a gravitation model in empirical analysis (Krings
et al., 2009; Levy, 2010). These studies were all done by physicists,
who would not pay much attention to geographical factors. In fact,
although physical connections are not required for aviation sys-
tems, locations of airports are xed in space, while extremely long
routes are rare and small cities usually make use of the adjacent
transfer hubs. In this case, aviation systems always involve the
study of distance, what is the spatial mechanism, therefore, behind
such systems? How does the geographical distance inuence the
network structure and trafc ow in the systems? To the authors
knowledge, they are still topics that require further study and con-
stitute the main motivation of this paper.
The aim of this work is to offer a novel perspective to survey the
topological characteristics and spatial effects of aviation systems.
Major contributions of this paper are twofold. First, in contrast to
geographical research, the structure of aviation system will be
investigated from a complex network approach from the begin-
ning, and then a hierarchical topology, which can be explained
by the hub-and-stoke structure of aviation systems, will be de-
tected by analyzing the correlation between network indices. Sec-
ond, beneting from the complete dataset for all cities and routes,
the differences between spatial effects under different distance
scales in the aviation system are well explained. It will be estab-
lished that short-distance travel should be analyzed separately
from medium- and long-distance travel, which will pave a path
for future works.
The remainder of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2
introduces the study area and data sources, followed by a discus-
sion of methodology in Section 3. In Section 4, in order to under-
stand the fundamental topological structure of the system, some
important statistical measurements will be discussed for the un-
weighted network, and then the weighted network by introducing
weekly ight frequency. Section 5 will reveal the intrinsic spatial
architecture and impacts imposed by geographic proximity. To
build on this goal, node strength, population, and GDP will be
adopted to analyze the pattern of route weights based on spatial
distances. Subsequently, conclusions are given in the nal section.
2. Study area and data sources
The study area covered the whole of mainland China (except
Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), including 140 cities with airports
and 1044 domestic airlines. There were 166 airports in China by
2009. Generally speaking, each city represents a single airport.
For those cities with two airports, the data would be combined.
However, Chongqing City is the only exception. Even though
Wanzhou is administratively subordinate to Chongqing, they were
still studied separately in this paper because of the long spatial dis-
tance between them.1 All regular routes in the ight schedule from
2008 to 2009, both directed and stopovers were counted. However,
all international routes were excluded from this research.
To measure the trafc volume of corresponding routes, the
weekly ight frequency was chosen instead of passenger ow,
which was usually adopted by previous researchers. It is because
the data about weekly ight frequency is available for all levels
of cities, even for regional routes. This difference is crucial and will
be reected in the following sections. The data presented in this
paper is mainly based on the ight schedules of 2008 which are
published by airlines on their websites, as well as the Yearbook of
Chinese Transportation and Communications 2009 (YHCTC, 2009).
For the sake of simplicity, the slight differences between bidirec-
tional ight numbers for a few pairs of cities have been ignored.
The population and GDP data of airport cities were taken from
the China City Statistical Yearbook 2009 (NBSC, 2009a) and China
Statistical Yearbook for Regional Economy 2009 (NBSC, 2009b). The
ight distance between cities was based on the Ticketed Point
Mileage (TPM) data which is published by International Air Trans-
port Association (IATA).
3. Research methods
3.1. Network representation
Complex network analyses must start with the representation
of a real system. According to Graph Theory (Diestel, 2005), a net-
work can be generalized as G = (V, E), which is comprised of a ver-
tex (node) set V and an edge (link) set E. Two nodes, who share a
common link, may be regarded as connected or adjacent. More-
over, in order to store and analyze a network in a computer system
the adjacent matrix was introduced. If there is an edge between
1
It is worth mentioning that Wanzhou had been an independent administratively
city before it became a district of Chongqing city in 1997.
 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
two nodes, then the entry element in the matrix is equal to 1,
otherwise it is 0. Due to the line-by-line topological structure of
aviation systems, it is not imperative to pay extra attention to
the generalization method of networks, so that the underlying
inuences of different representative spaces can be ignored. In this
work, each city was taken as a node, no matter how many airports
it possessed, while regular routes, as indicated above, were estab-
lished as edges.
3.2. Centrality measurements
Centrality was originally proposed as a geographical concept in
the Central Place Theory (Christaller, 1933). It was rstly intro-
duced in sociology as a fundamental concept for network topolog-
ical analysis (Freeman, 1979), and was quickly adopted by a wide
range of other elds.
3.2.1. Node degree and degree distribution
It is believed that the most important node must be the most
active one, so degree centrality indicates the number of edges con-
nected to a node, which is dened based on an adjacent matrix as,
X
ki aij
j2Vi
In the equation, V(i) represents the neighbor set of node i, and aij is
the entry value in the adjacent matrix, which is equal to 1 or 0
depending on whether the two nodes are linked or not. Moreover,
if the degree of a network follows a power-law distribution, then
it presents the scale-free property (Barabsi and Albert, 1999).
Moreover, various centrality measures were also established in
the last decade, including betweenness, closeness, straightness,
information centrality and so on (Crucitti et al., 2006), which could
capture different characteristics of transport networks (Ma and
Timberlake, 2008; Wang et al., 2011). In this research, only degree
is discussed for the following reasons. Firstly, Node degree is the
most straightforward index to determine and quantify individual
accessibility, and is most familiar to geographers (Kansky, 1963;
Taaffe et al., 1996). Besides, the denition of node strength for
weighted networks is derived from degree in some sense. Sec-
ondly, it will be used in correlation analyses to identify the mixing
patterns and hierarchical structure. As a result, due to limited
space, it has been selected to represent the node centrality.
3.2.2. Weight and strength
Most real networks present a high degree of heterogeneity with
regard to the intensity of communications. In order to manage this
type of diversity, edge weight was proposed to measure the cen-
trality of connections between node pairs. For actual transport sys-
tems, many different quantities could be considered as weight,
including trafc ow, travel times, geodesic distances and so on.
In this sense, an unweighted network can be seen as a special case
of weighted networks when all edge weights are equal to 1.
Given the edge weight, the node strength si can be generated in
terms of the denition of node degree,
X
si wij
j2Vi
V(i) represents the neighbor set of node i, while wij indicates the
weight of the edge between i and j. In our research, the weight wij
of a link from city i to city j is understood as the number of ights
between the cities in 1 week, either from city i to j or from j to i. In
this sense, the strength of node i indicates the weekly ight num-
bers departing from or arriving at the city. Weighted networks pro-
vide a good description and explanation for the rich dynamics
observed in real systems.
111
3.3. Network clustering
3.3.1. Clustering coefcient
The purpose of the clustering coefcient is to quantify the de-
gree of clustering of a graph. The clustering coefcient calculates
the probability that two neighbors of a node are likely connected
with each other (Watts and Strogatz, 1998), which could be de-
ned as,
2mi
ci 3
ki ki  1
where mi indicates the number of edges between the rst neighbors
of node i, and ki which denotes the node degree of i. Then, the clus-
tering coefcient of the graph is derived from the average of ci over
all N nodes,
1 X
C hci i ci 4
N i2N
In terms of the denitions, both ci and C would fall into the range of
[0, 1].
1 3.3.2. Characteristic path length
Characteristic path length is a global property which is essential
to the topology and communication efciency of networks. It re-
ects the internal structure of a network because it contains the
internal separations of all node pairs.
1 X
L dij 5
NN  1 ij
where N is the number of vertices in the network, and dij indicates
the distance between two arbitrary vertices in the network. In sum-
mary, a high value of clustering coefcient and a short characteristic
path length are acknowledged as two indices for the small-world
property, which indicates the presence of clustering for real net-
works despite their large size (Watts and Strogatz, 1998).
3.4. Correlation
3.4.1. Degreedegree correlation
The degreedegree correlation reects a nodes connection pref-
erence, which can be measured by the relationship between the
node degree and the average degree for all of its connected nodes,
1 X
K i k kj 6
ki j2Vi
Of which ki is the degree centrality of node i. V(i) includes all neigh-
boring nodes of i. In this case only the closest neighborhood for the
node is considered. With this denition, one can probe a networks
mixing pattern (Newman, 2003). If high-degree nodes link prefer-
entially with each other, this tendency is regarded as assortative
mixing. In contrast, if high-degree nodes connect preferentially
with low-degree ones, this situation is referred to as disassortative
mixing.
2
3.4.2. Degree-clustering correlation
The scale-free property and high clustering coexist in many real
systems. Rabasz and Barabasi (2003) noticed this phenomenon and
considered it to be the consequence of a hierarchical organization
of networks, which could be revealed by detecting a scaling law be-
tween the node degree and the clustering coefcient of real sys-
tems. On the other hand, geometric factors are considered to
remove the hierarchy, although no further reasons are given in
their work. Four years later, Liu and Zhou (2007) detected a scaling
correlation between the vertex degree and the clustering
112 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
coefcient for the aviation system, which challenged the previous
conclusion. However, no spatial analysis followed to explain this
nding.
In our research, before discussing the spatial characteristics of
Chinas aviation system, this statistical method is adopted as,
1 X a
Ck Ci  k 7 to each other. As for the individual clustering coefcient, the low-
Nk k k
i est three values 0.169, 0.177 and 0.203 are respectively from Bei-
In which N(k) indicates the number of nodes whose degree is equal
to k. From the structural perspective, a hierarchical organization im-
plies that the small groups of nodes assemble in a hierarchical man-
ner, into increasingly large groups.
3.5. Using the gravitational model to establish the distance dependence
function
The Gravitational Model, extended from Newtons Law of Uni-
versal Gravitation, is a valuable branch of spatial interaction mod-
els in geography. In this research, it is introduced to explain the
impact of geographic distances on the aviation system. There are
two common forms of the distance decay function in spatial inter-
action models, including a negative exponential expression derived
from the entropy-maximizing theory (Wilson, 1970), and an in-
verse power law in traditional gravitational studies (Mikkonen
and Luoma, 1999). To detect the possible result of distance effects,
a general version could be given as follows,
W ij / Mi Mj f dij 8 tions, while Xiamen (10th) falls to 48 and Hohhot (28th) to 30. This
Wij is the trafc ow between cities i and j, corresponding to the
edge weight in the aviation network. Mi and Mj represent a measure-
ment respectively for the origin and destination cities. In the follow-
ing section, three options including the population, gross domestic
product (GDP) and node strength will be considered. The three vari-
ables respectively represent demographic, socio-economic and net-
work factors of a city. Finally, the distance dependence function f(dij)
in terms of ight distance dij will be determined by OLS regression.
4. Statistic characteristics of Chinas aviation network
4.1. Small world and scale-free properties
Chinas aviation network presents the small-world property,
which is also found in the US and European countries (Bagler,
2008; Chi et al., 2003; Guimer et al., 2005). The average path
length of the network is 2.108, a little larger than that of the US.
This means, in a statistical sense, passengers can reach any city
in this network by transferring only once on average. In Chinas
aviation network, only 10% of city pairs are reachable by direct
ights. However, with the development of the hub-and-spoke
structure (Jin et al., 2004; Lei and OConnell, 2011), almost 78% of
city pairs in the system are reachable by one transfer or less. The
diameter of the network is 4, which is also the largest topological
distance between cities within this network. Such routes all begin
from Tongren City and travel to 11 isolated cities in Xinjiang Uygur
Autonomous Region. Tongren, located in northeast Guizhou Por-
vince, has two air routes to Guiyang and Guilin, which are not pow-
erful transfer hubs within the network. It is worth mentioning
more about the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region here. It covers
an area of 1,664,900 km2, which is the largest province in China,
and its ground transport system is underdeveloped due to the
backward economy and complicated geographic conditions. As a
result, the province has a large number of airports, while most of
them only connect to the provincial capital, Urumqi.
In addition, the clustering coefcient is also an indispensable
measurement for small-world properties. The clustering coefcient
of the unweighted aviation network of China is 0.737, very close to
the value of the US and a little higher than that of the worldwide
aviation network. In contrast, the result of a random network in
the same size with CAS is around 0.107. It is much lower than
the real network. The high degree of clustering of Chinas aviation
network indicates that a citys neighbors are also likely to connect
jing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. In addition, there are 43 cities
whose clustering coefcients are equal to 1, and it is worth point-
ing out that the connections of these cities are all less than 8. This
phenomenon will be clearly explained in terms of the degree pat-
tern in correlation analysis. Generally speaking, a high clustering
coefcient would indicate an efcient network for travel mobility.
However, it does not mean that the highest level is the best. In a
statistical sense, a complete graphs clustering coefcient is equal
to 1, which means that every pair of vertices is connected. This,
undoubtedly, creates a situation that is impossible and uneconom-
ical for aviation systems.
As Fig. 1 shows, the node degree of Chinas aviation network fol-
lows a two-regime power-law distribution. It indicates that CAS is
an evolving scale-free network, with middle-sized cities suffering
from inadequate developments due to the inhibition from few
dominant cities. Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai are the most
connected cities with degrees of 99, 94 and 86, respectively. How-
ever, the number of links declines rapidly where smaller cities are
concerned. Shenzhen, which ranked the 4th, possesses 68 connec-
phenomenon is also validated by averaging all the degrees. The
average degree of the whole network is 14.9; however, around
70% of cities fall below this level. This is also the index with the
largest gap between China (14.9) and the US (48.2). During the air-
line consolidation in 2002, three primary carriers including Air Chi-
na, China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines, respectively
established their national hubs as Beijing, Guangzhou and Shang-
hai. Other small airlines were merged into these three carriers,
while only a few of the strongest regional airlines survived namely
Hainan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Sichuan and Shandong (Lei and
OConnell, 2011). Although some new airlines, such as Spring Air-
lines, China Express Air, Juneyao Airlines, and Capital Airlines and
so on, have entered into the system in recent years, they are not
competitive enough to form powerful hubs.
4.2. Distribution of edge weight and node strength
Most previous researchers chose passenger ow as a weight.
However, due to a lack of sufcient data on passenger ow for all
city pairs within CAS, they had to ignore some lighter-trafc regio-
nal routes. In this research, the weekly frequency of ights is used
10
Cumulative Probability
1
y = 1.147x-0.482
0,1 R2 = 0.980
y = 1197.4x-2.517
0,01 R2 = 0.966
0,001
1 10 100
Degree
Fig. 1. Cumulative probability distribution of the node degree of CAS on loglog
scales.

to avoid this problem. Fig. 2 describes the distribution of the edge
weight for 1044 air routes and the node strength for 140 cities on
loglog scales. The strength of a hub is closely associated with node
degree. Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, whose strength values
are 8.339, 7.684 and 6.433 respectively, are the strongest and most
dominant hubs, followed by some regional hubs, including Shenz-
hen, Kunming, Chengdu, Chongqing, Xian, etc. The busiest ve
routes connect these regional hubs to national hubs, namely
BeijingShanghai, ShanghaiShenzhen, ShanghaiChengdu, Bei-
jingGuangzhou and GuangzhouChongqing. Comparatively, the
cities with lower strength values are mostly located in less devel-
oped regions near the borders, including Xinjiang Uygur Autono-
mous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and so on. For
example, the last ve cities according to strength rank are Qiemo,
Kuche, Tacheng, Hami and Wuhai, their strength values are all less
than 0.01. Four of them are located in Xinjiang, and the only avail-
able destination is to the provincial capital Urumqi. Nevertheless,
the least frequent routes do not exist between them. There are 29
city pairs that only allow one ight per week, some of which are
very far away from each other; XianLhasa and ShanghaiJiamusi
are examples.
Remarkably, the distribution of the edge weight and the node
strength both obey a two-regime power law instead of a standard
scaling distribution. The reason for this may be that the dominant
hubs in CAS are not powerful enough to form strict power-law
behaviors. A brief review on the policy changes of the airline indus-
try could help explain this phenomenon more clearly. Because of
the airline deregulation on market and route entry in 1997, many
new regional airlines were established, leading to a signicant in-
crease of routes between their base cities and domestic major cities.
In this period, these regional hubs experienced growth in air trafc,
which diverted the trafc from neighboring cities to some extent.
For example, the increase of air passengers in Guangzhou was rela-
tively slow due to the growth of Shenzhen, which is only 170 km
from Guangzhou. Furthermore, in response to years of operating
loss caused by the Southeast Asian nancial crisis, CAAC in 2002
planned to open a number of regional routes, which were prohib-
ited from stopping in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Five years
later, CAAC further decided to take control of the air trafc volume
in some extremely busy airports from August 2007 to March 2008.
To sum up, these measures, to varying extents, have hindered the
scaling distributions of node strength and edge weight.
4.3. Correlation analysis
4.3.1. Mixing pattern
Fig. 3 illustrates the degree correlation for CAS. It has been
calculated that the average degree of the network is 14.9, which
10
1 10
Cumulative Probability
1
0,1
y = 2.689x -0.814
R2 = 0.904
0,01
0,001
0,0001
Fig. 2. Cumulative probability distribution of (a) the weight distribution of 1044 routes, and (b) the strength distribution for 140 cities in the aviation network on loglog
scales.
J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117 113
can be referred to as a threshold in the plot. For those cities
whose degree values are above the average (circles), their de-
grees are negatively related to the average degrees of their closet
neighbors K(k). Such phenomena indicate the disassortativity for
these nodes. The higher degree a city has, the lower the average
degree for its rst neighbors. Beijing enjoys the highest degree of
99 in the network and the lowest K(k) of 18.8. In comparison, for
cities whose degree values are below the average (triangles),
there is no distinct correlation between them and their neigh-
bors. For an aviation network, this situation is reasonable. The
dominant cities in the network try to attract more links to rein-
force their dominant position. On the other hand, for low-degree
cities two extremes could be expected. First, it would be prefer-
able for low-degree cities to be connected with high-degree cit-
ies to minimize their operation costs. The maximum K(k) value
in Fig. 3 is associated with Wuhai, which only possesses one link
with Beijing. On the other hand, some low-degree cities and
medium-degree cities are connected with each other for special
city functions or because of location constraints. For example,
the minimum K(k) value for low-degree cities is associated with
Qiemo, located in the southern part of Xinjiang Province. This
city has two airlines, one of which is paired with a two-degree
city, Kuerle.
4.3.2. Hierarchical structure of Chinas aviation system
Fig. 4a describes the relationship between the clustering coef-
cient C(k) and the node degree. Considering the weighted network,
the relationship between the clustering coefcient and the node
strength is also presented (Fig. 4b). Clearly, they display similar
patterns. However, it is worth noting that the clustering coefcient
is not independent of the node centrality but follows a scaling law
in terms of the centrality (Fig. 4). This conclusion is consistent with
the ndings of Liu and Zhou (2007). The higher degree or strength a
city has, the smaller its clustering coefcient becomes. In other
words, the low-degree cities are more inclined to be clustered. As
mentioned above, the degree values of the 43 cities with clustering
coefcients of one are consistently placed between two to eight.
Indeed, those high-degree or high-strength node cities, which act
as regional hubs or national hubs in the aviation network, such
as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, provide powerful
bridge roles that their neighbors are not necessarily connected di-
rectly with each other, resulting in a small C(k). It is also worth
mentioning that gateway cities usually have lower clustering coef-
cients which are not commensurate with their centrality values.
For example, the clustering coefcient of Urumqi is 0.417, even
lower than Chengdus 0.421, while their strength values are
respectively 1.448 and 4.161. Hohhot is another example of this
phenomenon.
10
100 1000 0,001 0,01 0,1 1 10
Cumulative Probability
1
y = 0.211x-0.355
0,1 R2 = 0.973
0,01 y = 0.293x-1.543
y = 620.96x -2.204 R2 = 0.977
R2 = 0.981
(a) (b)
0,001
Weight Strength
114 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
120
100
80
K (k)
60 y = -0.411x + 54.876
R2 = 0.922
40
20
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Degree
Fig. 3. The node degree correlation of CAS.
In some sense, the hierarchy is consistent with the hub-and-
spoke structure of aviation systems. Each carrier has its own
geographical coverage and development orientations, to enhance
the competitiveness of its base cities. An initial hub-and-spoke net-
work would be constructed to offer ights from one or multiple
hubs to spoke cities (OKelly, 1998; Shaw et al., 2009). Taking the
Sichuan Airlines as an example, its goal is to develop Chengdu,
the provincial capital of Sichuan Province, into the southwest
portal of CAS. However, after the airline consolidations in 2002, it
became very difcult for regional airlines to compete with the
three major airlines. Instead, they chose to join with a major carrier
and integrate their internal modules. Therefore, many peripheral
cities, acting as the branch terminals, became organized into a
sub-network with a regional hub, and later into large networks
with national hubs in a hierarchical manner.
In this research, the hierarchical structure of Chinas aviation
network is captured from the topological perspective. On the other
hand, as mentioned at the beginning of this paper, it is undeniable
that an aviation network exhibits meaningful spatial implications
and is fundamentally spatially-oriented. Either the operation cost
or trafc ow are closely related to the distance between two cit-
ies, making the geography an indispensable force throughout the
evolving process of an aviation system. This became a challenge
to the view of Rabasz and Barabasi (2003) that hierarchy is absent
in distance-driven networks. These seemingly contradictory prop-
ositions illustrate the uniqueness of aviation systems and prove
that further studies on their spatial patterns are merited.
5. Spatial network structure of Chinas aviation system
As emphasized earlier in this paper, it is not necessary to set up
physical routes in real aviation systems to avoid the limitations of
certain geographical factors to some extent. This unique property
1.2
Clustering Coefficient
0.8
0.4
(a)
0 0
0 50 100
Degree
Fig. 4. The scaling correlation between two node centrality indices and the clustering coefcient (Plot (a) depicts the relationship between degree centrality and clustering
coefcient, while plot (b) is for node strength and clustering coefcient. Due to the positive correlation between degree and strength, these two plots share a similar trend).
90
80
70
Frequence
60
50
40
30
20
10
200 700 1200 1700 2200 2700 3200 3700
Distance
Fig. 5. The histogram of geographical distances between city pairs in CAS.
makes aviation systems different from distance-driven ground
transport systems, just as the correlation studies implied. How-
ever, how do aviation networks get rid of spatial effects, if indeed
they do? The real situation is complex and understanding its spa-
tial mechanism becomes interesting and challenging. This section
will present some ndings about the geographical characteristics
and the distance effects on trafc ow within Chinas aviation
network.
5.1. Spatial distribution of ight distances and trafc ow
Firstly, in terms of the distances of 1044 routes for each con-
nected city pair, the shortest route in Chinas aviation network is
142 km, from Haikou city to Zhanjiang city, while the longest is
3939 km, from Fuzhou to Urumchi. The range spans three orders
of magnitude of distance, indicating the network is geographically
large enough for empirical analysis. The histogram for the ight dis-
tances of 1044 city pairs is given in Fig. 5, with an average distance
of 1200 km. 89% of the routes are shorter than 2000 km, of which
approximate 66% fall into the range from 500 km to 1500 km.
According to the statistical data, the average distance for domestic
air travel in China was 1238 km in 2001 and 1300 km in 2008
(YHCTC, 2002, 2009), which falls well within the average route
length. The trafc data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics
in the United States also reveal a similar pattern, in that the passen-
ger trip length was 1395 km in 2009 and 1405 km in 2010 for
domestic airline travel (BTS, 2010). These data from two countries
are strikingly consistent. In comparison, the average distance for
domestic railway travel in China slightly increased from 470 km
in 2001 to 532 km in 2008 (MRC, 2002, 2009). High speed rail sys-
tems even possess overwhelming advantages for those trips which
are shorter than 600 km (Liu, 2009). Based on these data, domestic
aviation transportation in China could be divided into different
1.2
Clustering Coefficient
0.8
0.4
(b)
150 0 5 10
Strength
 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117 115

2500 to construct many long routes. This situation is benecial from a

passengers perspective as well. Transferring in a hub city during
2000 a long journey always means much cheaper tickets and more travel
Weekly flight flow

options, which results in a more convenient and exible travel

1500 experience. For example, there were only four direct ights per
week from Changchun to Sanya, which are 3700 km away from
1000 each other. In contrast, there were 118 ights from Changchun to
Beijing, and 39 ights from Beijing to Sanya. However, accurate pat-
500 terns cannot be detected just in view of these intuitive plots. The
next section will provide a more thorough analysis based on the
0 gravitation law, which is effective in revealing the spatial interac-
0 550 1050 1550 2050 2550 3050 3650
tions between two places.
Distance

Fig. 6. The distribution of ight ows on spatial distances in CAS.

5.2. Distance decay effects in Chinas aviation system

levels in terms of the ight distance, i.e. the short-haul trip, which is
less than 500 km, the medium-distance trip between 500 and
2000 km, and the long-distance trip, more than 2000 km. Fig. 6 also
presents a similar pattern. Almost 80% of the domestic trafc ow
moves between 500 and 2000 km, while only 7.6% accounts for
longer trips of 2000 km or more. Indeed, due to the small world
property of the airline network, several major cities can be conve-
nient transfer options for passengers, so that carriers do not need
In this section, Eq. (3) is adopted as the base model. Firstly, the
node strength (si), which represents the total number of ights in a
city according to the network denition, is used to measure Mi and
Mj. Fig. 7 shows the relationship between Wij and si  sj, and the
slope indicates f(dij) according to Eq. (3). Plot (a) represents the city
pairs whose distances are less than 500 km, and no clear pattern is
detected. Plot (b) represents a distance around 1000 km and plot
(c) represents 2000 km, Wij is proportional to si  sj in both plots,
and the slopes are respectively equal to 6.569 and 3.641. In plot

160 500

400 Slope=6.569
120
300
Weight
Weight

80
200
40
100
(a) (b)
0 0
0 10 20 0 40 80
Si*Sj Si*Sj

250 40

200 Slope=3.641 Slope=2.819

30
150
Weight
Weight

20
100
10
50
(c) (d)
0 0
0 20 40 60 0 5 10 15
Si*Sj Si*Sj

Fig. 7. The dependence of ight ows on strength and distance (Plot (a) depicts the distribution of weight in terms of si  sj for all city pairs whose distance is below 500 km;
Plot (b) is for 9001100 km; Plot (c) is for 18002200 km, and plot (d) is for the city pairs whose distances are above 2800 km).

Table 1
Regression results of the gravitation model for different Mi and Mj measurements.

Parameter Strength-based (si  sj) Population-based (pi  pj) GDP-based (gi  gj)
Suitable distance (km) >474 >145 >577
f(dij) a  da a  e1/d a  da a  da
Decay coefcient 0.697 0.920 0.702
R2 0.956 0.988 0.892 0.911
116 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
(d), the linear relationship is much weaker for the city pairs with
dij > 2800 km having a slope of 2.819. In conclusion, the linear rela-
tionship between the weight and the product of city strengths are
revealed for different dij by Fig. 7bd, which is consistent with Eq.
(3). Furthermore, the slopes decrease in terms of the distance,
preliminarily suggesting that f(dij) should be a decreasing function.
Additionally, two socio-economic factors, population and GDP
are also employed for comparison. For each measurement, the va-
lue of Wij/Mi  Mj for 1044 city pairs is calculated and the statistical
results are reported in Table 1. Similar patterns are detected for the
strength and GDP measurements. The decay coefcients are both
around 0.7 and the suitable distance ranges are similar. But the
population measurement generates completely different results.
First, the suitable distance limit is 145 km, much less than the oth-
ers. In addition, the data series ts better to a logarithmic hyper-
bolic model than to a scaling relationship. The reason for this
may be ascribed to the disturbance by an anomalous city pair,
i.e. ChengduJiuzhaigou in Sichuan Province. Jiuzhaigou County lo-
cated in the northwest part of Sichuan Province. Its population was
63,600 in 2008, and it is the smallest city in this research. Although
it is only 245 km away from the province capital, Chengdu, it still
handles huge ight trafc due to its outstanding tourism industry
and inconvenient geographical location. The ground transportation
system is underdeveloped and laborious due to the fact that it is
such a mountainous area. For this reason, ying is the most popu-
lar mode of transportation, and the regional hub, Chengdu, is the
best transfer choice for most tourists whose destination is Jiuzhai-
gou. Consequently an extremely high value of Wij/pi  pj is main-
tained for this pair. However, deleting the data related to this
pair under the population measurement will yield similar results
with GDP and node strength measurements.
Despite this slight anomaly, Table 1 conveys an indisputable
impression. For Chinas aviation system, the distance dependence
can only be detected for medium-and long-distance travel, and
the decay effect can be characterized by a general scaling relation-
ship. Some reasons for this conclusion are as follows. First, many
short airline routes are constructed for economical, geographical,
political and other reasons, which are less affected by spatial dis-
tances. For example, JiuzhaigouChengdu (245 km), Huangshan
Hefei (255 km), ZhangjiajieChangsha (266 km), LijiangKunming
(314 km) and WuyishanXiamen (362 km) routes all connect fa-
mous tourism cities to their provincial capitals, which act as regio-
nal hubs. Secondly, medium-length trips are the most competitive
for aviation systems. Railway systems and highway systems take
on the majority of trafc ow for short-distance trips, especially
because the ground transport networks are becoming more and
more convenient and fast. The emerging growth of high speed rail
in China since 2006 is bound to become a critical challenge for avi-
ation systems. In Europe, the high speed rail systems, including
Eurostar, TVG and Renfe, etc., have greatly affected the develop-
ment of the airline industry. How to optimize the network struc-
ture, increase the market quota for medium-distance travel and
enhance competitive advantages for long-distance travel are ur-
gent questions that the airline industry must consider. Lastly but
not the least important, although ight ow decays with distance
according to the gravitation law, it does not mean that the compar-
ative advantage of aviation systems for long-distance transport is
weakened. On the contrary, the small world property and the hier-
archical structure of aviation networks could produce more poten-
tial to facilitate long-distance mobility.
6. Conclusion
This paper has explored the statistical properties and spatial
characteristics of Chinas aviation system under a complex
network framework. The average path length is 2.108 and overall
clustering coefcient is 0.737, which brings to mind the small world
property of Chinas aviation system. In addition, the degree distri-
bution of the system shows a two-regime power law instead of a
perfect scale-free property. The reason can be partly attributed to
the uniquely evolving process and to state-led deregulation.
Although national hubs, namely Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou,
have dominated the network nationally, the centrality of regional
hubs or sub-regional hubs is still underdeveloped in China. The re-
sult of the average degree of CAS, which is around 15 and far below
the value of 48 as in the United States, also illustrated the
phenomenon.
Disassortative mixing and the hierarchical structure of Chinas
aviation network are revealed by correlation analysis. A high-de-
gree city is inclined to possess a lower average degree and cluster-
ing coefcient. Beijing, as the most connected hub in the network,
enjoys the highest degree of 99 as well as the lowest K(k), 18.8, and
the smallest clustering coefcient 0.169. Although the hierarchical
topology coincides with the nding of Liu and Zhou (2007), it by no
means proves that aviation systems can escape geographical ef-
fects as they suggested. On the contrary, it suggests a more com-
plex and interesting spatial mechanism to be discovered. In part
this is because geographical effects are not simply to be seen as
an elementary limitation of spatial distance. Optimizing the net-
work structure under distance constraints is of most signicance
for aviation systems. In some sense, the hierarchical topology re-
ects a hub-and-spoke structure, which is widely adopted by avi-
ation systems.
This paper proposes that the spatial pattern for CAS should be
studied under separate distance scales. Trafc ow for city pairs
with short distances is mostly inuenced by city functions rather
than geographical proximity. For example, the airline routes, such
as JiuzhaigouChengdu, WuyishanXiamen, and Zhangjiajie
Changsha, endure huge trafc ow as a result of their tourism
industry. Moreover, the competition from ground transportation
systems further hindered the emergence of a clear law for the
short-haul travel. In contrast, for medium- and long-distance travel,
the trafc ow exhibits apparent distance dependence. It can be
further summarized as a general gravitational law. In other words,
the trafc volume between two cities is proportional to the product
of their centrality measurements, and inversely proportional to
their geographical distance. Aviation systems are most competitive
on the medium-distance travel market, but the small world prop-
erty and the hierarchical structure have further extended the com-
petitive advantage to long-haul travel.
In summary, Chinas aviation system has undergone rapid
development since the open door policy in 1978. Distinct from
the airline deregulation experienced by western countries in a
market-oriented environment, China has gone through a state-
led liberalization stage. During this process, many crucial institu-
tional and structural characteristics have emerged and deserve
more attention. This article is exploratory, but raises various inter-
esting questions on how to optimize the network structure to cope
with the emerging challenges caused by improvement of railway
and highway systems, especially the worldwide appearance of high
speed rail systems. As well as how to minimize the transfer time
and improve the transfer service to enhance overall competitive-
ness of aviation systems on medium- and long-haul trips. More de-
tailed and dynamic analysis can be expected when international
routes are added and longitudinal data for individual airlines be-
come available.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Dr. Yanguang Chen for his help-
ful suggestions on the data processing. Many thanks owe to Dr. Bin
Jiang and Dr. Yifang Ban for the valuable comments to improve the
 J. Lin / Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 109117
manuscript. The two anonymous reviewers provided insightful
feedback, which helped the author to improve the structure and
content of this article.
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