Published on : Tuesday, March 5, 2019
This counterintuitive effect developed talks partially by Nuno Araujo on the opening day of the American Physical Society’s March Meeting. It will take place this week in Boston. Araujo and his colleagues at Lisbon University, Portugal, have been researching the world aviation network, or WAN, for many years now. Their model is related to data from openflights.org, and it takes in related info as the locations of the world’s 3237 airports (nodes) and the structure of the 18125 are interconnected between them.
Each airport on average, in this network is connected to 19.21 others, as the average number of connecting flights required to get from point A to point B is 4.05. The maximum number of connections, in the meantime, is 12. You aren’t the only one if a 12-connection journey doesn’t sound like your idea of a relaxing holiday. The Lisbon group’s latest research mixes the WAN information with data where travelers actually go. One of their findings is that people who fly for leisure purpose mainly prefer destinations that are either nearby (defined as less than 1000km distant), or connected by a single, direct flight.
While speaking as someone who once flew from north-east England to Kansas City, my hometown via London, Reykjavik, New York and Atlanta, I can’t say I’m shocked by this outcome. However, the group’s other findings include some head-scratchers. It’s become an everyday affair to say that we live in a highly interconnected world. Certainly, the fact that it is theoretically feasible to fly from the tiniest airport in country A, to an equally off-the-beaten-track destination in country B, in no more than 12 “hops”, is in some ways proof of this connectedness.