Aviation and Geography

In the more than 100 years since the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aviation has become a significant influence on human geography. The world's air carriers now account for most intercontinental and transcontinental passenger trips and a rapidly growing share of shorter-haul movements, and they carry about 40% of world trade by value. Air transportation has become more important as it has become more affordable due both to technological change and, especially in the past few decades, to the deregulation and privatization of the airline industry. The resulting increased share of the world's travelers and cargo moved by air has affected patterns of urban and regional economic development and has helped enlarge the spatial scale of everyday life—as is evident in the global traffic in everything from tourists to fresh-cut flowers. At the same time, however, inexpensive and widespread air mobility has emerged as a potent force affecting the environment.

An early theme of geographic research on air transportation concerned the development of airline networks. In the 1950s, geographers examined the structure of airline networks in the United States, for instance, as a way of learning about the broader structure of the American urban hierarchy. Today, the scale of interest is global. The world's airlines operate networks within which the primacy of alpha world cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo is evident. Conversely, cities in the periphery tend to be more difficult and expensive to reach, and that disadvantage, among many, perpetuates their poverty.

The architecture of an airline network is not, however, solely attributable to the relative wealth and power of the cities linked. Aircraft technology is another important consideration; advances in the capacity, speed, and range of commercial airliners have encouraged time-space compression, the stretching of nonstop linkages, and the consolidation of traffic at a relative handful of major hubs. In the past decade, airlines have begun flying several aircraft models whose range is long enough to connect almost any two cities on the [Page 180]planet nonstop. Among these new planes is the Airbus A380, which not only has a very long range but is also the largest commercial jet in service. The A380, which has lower costs per passenger-kilometer due to economies of scale, is expected to fly on routes linking the world's most important hubs, especially in Asia. Interestingly, the maiden commercial flight taken by the “Superjumbo” linked Singapore and Sydney, making it the first major jetliner to debut on a route involving neither the United States nor Europe.

Figure 1 Midwest Airlines network: an example of a hub-and-spoke network

Source: Author.

Singapore and Sydney are examples of cities that have benefited greatly from the privatization and deregulation of the airline industry. Since the 1970s, many formerly state-owned carriers, such as Singapore Airlines and Australia's Qantas, have been at least partially privatized, and governments have loosened regulations that once limited the number of airlines on particular routes, the capacity they offered, and the airfares and air cargo rates they levied. Geographers have analyzed the consequences of these changes across the world. In the United States, deregulation in 1978 led to the elaboration of hub-and-spoke systems with many “spoke” cities feeding traffic into and being fed in turn by traffic from one of several major hubs. Midwest Airlines (Figure 1), for instance, is able to offer higher frequency service to more destinations by consolidating traffic at its two hubs.

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