Airline emissions charges and airline networks

Emissions charges are an effective tool to control aviation carbon dioxide emissions. This paper investigates how airline emissions charges affect a monopoly airline's network choice. By considering simultaneously fully-connected, hub-spoke and mixed networks, we find that the impact of emissions charges on airline network configuration depends crucially on some relevant parameters, for example, the marginal benefit of the reduction of schedule delays and the disutility of additional travel time of connecting flights. Welfare analysis shows a discontinuity in the network configuration from the social planner's perspective and an inefficiency related to the airline's choice on mixed network.     

On the multi-dimensionality and sampling of air transport networks

Complex network theory is a framework increasingly used in the study of air transport networks, thanks to its ability to describe the structures created by networks of flights, and their influence in dynamical processes such as delay propagation. While many works consider only a fraction of the network, created by major airports or airlines, for example, it is not clear if and how such sampling process bias the observed structures and processes. In this contribution, we tackle this problem by studying how some observed topological metrics depend on the way the network is reconstructed, i.e. on the rules used to sample nodes and connections. Both structural and simple dynamical properties are considered, for eight major air networks and different source datasets. Results indicate that using a subset of airports strongly distorts our perception of the network, even when just small ones are discarded; at the same time, considering a subset of airlines yields a better and more stable representation. This allows us to provide some general guidelines on the way airports and connections should be sampled.     

Airline choice and tourism growth in the Azores

This study examines the effect of airline choice on tourism growth in the Azores. The results reveal that tourism numbers increased sharply as more alternative choices emerged to visitors after the entrance of low-cost carriers due to airline liberalization. Moreover, different airline types attract different kinds of visitors, contributing to tourism diversification. In particular, low-cost airline tourists are younger than those who travel in full-service airlines or charter flights. They are also more likely to buy a last-minute ticket and to come from Iberian and French markets. Charter flights, however, are important choices for those traveling to the Azores from more distant markets such as Sweden and Denmark.     

Airline in-flight entertainment: the passengers’ perspective

Following relaxation of economic regulation in many aviation markets, the competition amongst airlines has intensified in recent years. This has resulted in improvements in airline products, especially in the in-flight services. One of the areas on which airlines have focused their attention is the provision of personal in-flight entertainment (IFE). In 1998, airlines spent $1.8 billion on IFE. However, the industry is faced with a number of questions in relation to such levels of investment: Are the investments justified? Does IFE influence passengers’ choice of airline? Does IFE have a revenue-generating potential? What does the future hold as far as the IFE services are concerned? This paper addresses these questions based on a passengers survey and literature review. The results indicate that while IFE is not amongst the primary factors affecting passengers’ choice, it contributes greatly to passengers’ satisfaction with airline services. While provision of IFE can currently act as a differentiating factor, in the future it will become part of passengers’ expectations. It has also become apparent that, while IFE has the potential to generate some revenue, it would not be enough to cover the total costs associated with the installation and running of IFE systems. The impact of IFE would be felt, indirectly, through increase in passenger loyalty which should have a positive impact on airline revenues.     

Evaluating airline efficiency: An application of Virtual Frontier Network SBM

In this paper, airline efficiency is divided into three stages: Operations Stage, Services Stage and Sales Stage. The new three-stage strategic operating framework of airline efficiency is a modification of existing models. A new model, Virtual Frontier Network SBM, is proposed to evaluate the efficiency of 22 international airlines from 2008 to 2012. The results demonstrate the following: 1. The new model can apply to a new benchmarking airline such as Scandinavian Airlines. 2. Although passenger traffic, cargo traffic and revenue decreased from 2008 to 2009, most airlines’ overall efficiency increased in the period.     

A novel heuristic approach for solving aircraft landing problem with single runway

Nowadays, airlines administrations are more willing to utilize optimization tools to control air traffic due to considerable increases in volume of air transports. A challenging problem in the field of air traffic is how to optimally schedule landing time of aircrafts and assign them to different runways such that early and late landing costs are minimized. This problem is called aircraft landing problem (ALP). This paper proposes a novel decomposition based heuristic by solving two sub-problems for the ALP with single runway. In the first sub-problem, we apply the adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm to find a sequence of aircrafts. The solution found in the first sub-problem will be sent to the second sub-problem, to check for the feasibility of the solution using CPLEX solver. A set of benchmark problem are taken from the OR library for the purpose of comparison with other existing approaches. The computational results exhibit that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding the best known optimal solution for all the instances.     

Airline new route selection using compromise programming - The case of Taiwan-Europe

The decision to launch a new route has a huge effect on the outcomes of airlines in the market. In order to find potential destinations for airlines, this paper utilizes a compromise programming method for selecting direct flight routes. The selection framework comprises two objective functions, with one maximizing total revenue and the other minimizing total cost. A case studying Taiwan-European region destinations is interpreted in the analysis. The results indicate that four potential routes, including Madrid, Milan, Munich and Zurich should be added to the airlines’ service destinations. Therefore, this research suggested that the airport authority could apply incentives scheme to attract carriers to open new routes and add flight frequencies to strengthen its competitiveness.     

Cascading failures in airport networks

Cascading failure phenomena can appear in complex networks that distribute flows of information, people or goods, when flow going through nodes or edges exceeds the capacity of network nodes or edges. Cascading failure models from previous research are not adequate for airport networks, as flow is not continuous, and load has to be redistributed among close airports, rather than previously existing connections. With these constraints in mind, we have defined an algorithm to simulate the management of cascading failures in airport networks. We use the algorithm to evaluate the effectiveness of several selection rules of alternative departure and arrival airports to affected flights to reduce the impact of the cascading failure. We have applied the algorithm to the Oceanic Airport Network to assess the impact of several incidents. Results show that selection rules of arriving airports have significant impact in reducing the effect of incidents affecting central airports.     

Benchmarking the performance of Chinese airlines: An investigation of productivity,yield and cost competitiveness

In the past decade, the Chinese airline industry experienced extraordinary growth in size and profitability. However, no quantitative study has investigated the performance of Chinese airlines in terms of productivity and cost competitiveness. This study investigates the leading Chinese airlines' productivity, yield, cost competitiveness and input prices, and benchmarks them against major airlines around the world. It finds that Chinese airlines' productivity has improved significantly in the past decade but still lags behind that of industry leaders. Chinese carriers enjoyed high yields and low input prices in the domestic market, which led to high profitability in recent years. However, their cost advantage has been diminishing. To sustain long-term growth, Chinese airlines need to adopt the industry's best practices in a timely manner. Both the aviation markets and input markets in China should be further liberalized.     

Flying Australia–Europe via China: A qualitative analysis of the factors affecting travelers' choice of Chinese carriers using online comments data

Recently, Chinese carriers entered the Australia–Europe route, a market currently served by several established airlines. The paper aims to explore and identify the contextual factors affecting the choice of China-based carriers for long-haul travel. The paper's innovation is in the way it uses the online comments made by readers of an aviation news article. In doing so, the paper highlights the advantages and limitations of such a data source and the full range of positive and negative perceptions about Chinese airlines as recorded by potential and actual travelers. This study highlights that in order to understand flight choice, it is worthwhile to consider the conventional itinerary choice factors in the context of the socio-cultural and historical influences. For researchers, the paper provides some evidence that air travelers apply compensatory decision rule in making airline choices. This supports the validity of the assumption of random-utility based choice models used in the study of air travel behavior.     

Exploring the network structure and nodal centrality of China’s air transport network: A complex network approach

This paper uses a complex network approach to examine the network structure and nodal centrality of individual cities in the air transport network of China (ATNC). Measures for overall network structure include degree distribution, average path length and clustering coefficient. Centrality metrics for individual cities are degree, closeness and betweenness, representing a node’s location advantage as being directly connected to others, being accessible to others, and being the intermediary between others, respectively. Results indicate that the ATNC has a cumulative degree distribution captured by an exponential function, and displays some small-world (SW) network properties with an average path length of 2.23 and a clustering coefficient of 0.69. All three centrality indices are highly correlated with socio-economic indicators of cities such as air passenger volume, population, and gross regional domestic product (GRDP). This confirms that centrality captures a crucial aspect of location advantage in the ATNC and has important implications in shaping the spatial pattern of economic activities. Most small and low-degree airports are directly connected to the largest cities with the best centrality and bypass their regional centers, and therefore sub-networks in the ATNC are less developed except for Kunming in the southwest and Urumchi in the northwest because of their strategic locations for geographic and political reasons. The ANTC is relatively young, and not as efficient and well-developed as that of the US.     

Frequency and aircraft size dynamics in a concentrated growth market: The case of the Chinese domestic market

Despite the explosive growth of the Chinese aviation sector and the major industry reforms undertaken in recent decades, the Chinese domestic market remains highly concentrated with a significant element of regulation and governmental control in areas such as market entry and airline fleet planning. In this study, we investigate the frequency strategies and aircraft choices of airlines operating in this concentrated growth market. Our empirical investigation suggests that airlines mainly accommodate rapid traffic growth by flying more frequently, although increased aircraft size also contributes to market expansion. We also find a negative relationship between market concentration and flight frequency. Due to the more balanced market structure resulting from mergers among leading airlines since 2002, there has been a moderate reduction in market concentration at route level, contributing to a 3.7% increase in traffic volume from 2002 to 2008. The results of our study suggest that Chinese travelers have yet to fully enjoy the benefits of market liberalization, and airports should prioritize increasing capacity related to aircraft movements over the accommodation of larger aircraft.     

Performance evaluation of China's air routes based on network data envelopment analysis approach

Air routes are among the most important elements of civil aviation transport. Airlines' operations are mainly dependent on the structure and layout of air routes. This paper first divides the production process of air routes into two stages, allocation and transport, based on air route operational characteristics. Then, two network data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are proposed to analyze the efficiency of the system, allocation, passenger transport, and freight transport of 477 air routes. The research result demonstrates that the different constraints on intermediate measure in the network DEA models do affect the air routes’ efficiency significantly; Most air routes have high allocation efficiency and passenger transport efficiency, while they have low freight transport efficiency. Furthermore, the efficiencies of 82 airports are also analyzed after aggregating the efficiencies of the air routes.     

Mutual influence across routes using a common airport: The case of the domestic market in Japan

This paper empirically investigates the mutual influence of traffic volumes across routes serving the same airport. Regression analysis using the data on Japan's domestic air transport market reveals that an increase in passengers on a given route has a positive effect on the number of passengers on other routes that share an endpoint airport with the given route. This result implies that a change in policy for an airport is likely to influence routes that do not serve that airport as well as the routes that do.     

Measuring the vulnerability of public transport networks

In the last years, studies on the vulnerability of public transport networks attract a growing attention because of the repercussions that incidents can have on the day-to-day functioning of a city. The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for measuring public transport network vulnerability taking the Madrid Metro system as an example. The consequences of a disruptions of riding times or the number of missed trips are analysed for each of the network links with a full scan approach implemented in GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Using real trips distribution, each link in the network is measured for criticality, from which the vulnerability of lines and stations can be calculated. The proposed methodology also makes it possible to analyse the role of circular lines in network vulnerability and to obtain a worst-case scenario for the successive disruption of links by simulating a targeted attack on the network. Results show the presence of critical links in the southern part of the network, where line density is low and ridership high. They also highlight the importance of the circular line as an element of network robustness.     

The impact of COVID-19 on airline passenger travel behavior: An exploratory analysis on the Chinese aviation market

China was the first airline market in the world to be hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been gradually recovering as the pandemic is largely contained domestically. However, with the global pandemic spread and great uncertainty, there has been a remarkable change in airline passengers’ travel behavior. This paper collected air passenger-level data from TravelSky in the Chinese market. In addition to the analyses on aggregate passenger flow patterns, this paper explores changes in airline passenger travel behavior, such as ticket booking time, age distribution of passengers, refunds and ticket changes, and passenger arrival time at airports. This is one of the first studies to focus on micro-level changes in airline passenger travel behavior by using objective passenger-level data. The pandemic-induced psychological changes in air travelers are explored, providing useful managerial and policymaking implications for the normalization of the pandemic and the recovery of the airline market in the post-pandemic era.     

Drivers of operational efficiency and its impact on market performance in the Indian Airline industry

India is considered to be one of the toughest aviation markets in the world, due to high fuel prices, overcapacity and intense price competition. It is therefore important to identify critical drivers of performance, which enable the airlines to survive and succeed in this emerging market with huge growth potential. In the current empirical study, we investigate the linkages between various performance drivers, operational efficiencies and market performance. An extensive data collection using primary and secondary sources enabled us to gather data on all the airlines operating in India, both private and public, for the period 2005–2012, on a variety of important parameters. We carried out a two-stage empirical analysis, which involved estimation of operational efficiencies during the first stage using Data Envelopment Analysis, and determination of performance drivers during the second stage using a two-way random effects GLS regression and also a Tobit model. Our findings suggest that while some of the structural and regulatory factors have an undesirable impact on airline performance, the low cost carriers in India have managed to achieve significant operational efficiencies. In addition, we find that, while cost efficiency is driven by a variety of factors, it is the technical efficiency which brings in better market performance through pricing power in the Indian airline industry.     

Evolution of the international air transportation country network from 2002 to 2013

In this research, we analyze the evolution of the international air transportation country network from 2002 to 2013 with two perspectives: The network’s physical topology and the functional network with traffic information. Our analysis shows that the network is scale-free and has the small-world property. The evolution of triadic properties suggests that the network gears towards symmetric, transitive closure. We find that United States, Great Britain, and France are critical from both perspectives; Surprisingly, South Africa is particularly critical from topological point of view. Furthermore, topological and functional criticality are highly correlated to the GDP of a country.     

Increasing the resilience of air traffic networks using a network graph theory approach

Air traffic networks are essential to today’s global society. They are the fastest means of transporting physical goods and people and are a major contributor to the globalisation of the world’s economy. This increasing reliance requires these networks to have high resilience; however, previous events show that they can be susceptible to natural hazards. We assess two strategies to improve the resilience of air traffic networks and show an adaptive reconfiguration strategy is superior to a permanent re-routing solution. We find that, if traffic networks have fixed air routes, the geographical location of airports leaves them vulnerable to spatial hazard.