The global network of links between the world's airports looks robust but contains a hidden weakness that could lead to entire regions being cut off.
From the article:
An example is St Petersburg airport in Tampa Bay, Florida. This has 24 connections and only 24 flights. Close this airport and the airports it connects to are all cut out of the global network. That makes the world airline network rather unusual. "It is surprising, insofar as there exists a highly resilient and strongly connected core consisting of a small fraction of airports together with an extremely fragile star-like periphery," say Verma and co.
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Hidden Vulnerability Discovered in Air Network
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 17 2014, @06:37AM
Gosh, we should think up some emergency management plans, that we could use in case something happens to an airport.
Do you suppose it would be possible to send the planes to other airports? Put people on buses, and trains? Like what happens when it snows?
Nah! That's Crazy talk! What was I thinking?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 17 2014, @05:10PM
Well you see, scheduled flight paths are like a series of tubes...
What a dumb "study". And as someone already pointed out, if your only 24 flights are from places going nowhere else, then you're not in the network to start with...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @06:44AM
Planes aren't trains in that the routes are locked and hard to change.
Take out that Florida airport and the planes it used to serve can still land elsewhere. There's still airport and airplane compatibility but the smaller planes can still land and take off from using big runways.
Entire regions get cut off if the volcanic ash covers large areas that contain the cities you want to go to. Whether you have a robust network or not matters little when the ash covers the entire region.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @07:08AM
Indeed. To relate it to the networks I'm sure the majority thought of when reading the headline:
Railway is like a wired network. Remove a central hub, and everything connected only to that one will have to be rewired.
The air traffic network is more like WLAN. If an access point fails, as long as another access point is in reach and not at its capacity limit you can just connect to that one instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:22AM
It's not quite as freely configurable as you imagine thanks to the cult of just in time.
Sure, the planes are physically capable of going to another airport, but where will that airport put them? If they were already in the air, they'll just deal with it, but believe it or not, that may cause a schedule disruption that lasts for days and is felt around the world. If the outage is going to last a while, airports near and far will be affected as schedules get bumped around.
True, not the end of the world. Now imagine a hub airport becomes unavailable. For example, there will be a lot of Southwest flights that won't happen if Denver closes. Even if they have a contingency hub somewhere (I don't know if they do or not), they will be down by a few aircraft stuck in Denver.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @11:14AM
You're imagining stuff I didn't imagine. I was talking about the routes. Of course when "stuff happens" there can be problems initially for the planes and airports doing the existing affected routes. But point is the routes can definitely change - they are not like railway tracks. It's not much of a problem from a network perspective that this article tries to claim.
Secondly your point is irrelevant in this context because even if there was a more "robust network", assuming it had the same utilization, the planes in the air will also have the same problems if their destinations go "poof", and so will their alternate destinations. For low utilization, there would be similarly fewer problems for either case.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 17 2014, @06:51AM
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Thursday April 17 2014, @07:58AM
Or better yet, High Fiber networks for increased flow-through for all your packets! Yes, gut wrenching Bandwidth!!!
That will also give your network increased regularity, and that's a good thing.
You can also now purge your network in one massive dump. Away goes your troubles, down the drain...just flushed away.
I'm sorry, but I just cannot accept the concept of an 'Air Network' made of planes that cannot reroute around unavailable airports. It sounds more like a railway system and trains the way they address the issue.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:24AM
"Or better yet, High Fiber networks for increased flow-through for all your packets!"
So if I start pouring All-Bran into my pockets when I travel...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:12AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:31PM
But who would want to enter a plane that is in perpetual beta? :-)
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday April 17 2014, @03:53PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday April 17 2014, @10:35AM
If all the airports it connects to would be cut out, then it was never part of the global network. Presumably it has at least one connection to another airport which itself has more than one connection. Right?
No offence to St Petersburg, but if they shut down I can't imagine it's going to cause the economy to crumble.
This is a fairly stupid conclusion from the study, anyway. It's not like the powers that be couldn't just redirect flights to another nearby airport (possibly one of the ones that currently only connects to St Petersburg) or create new flight routes.
Why, it's almost as if the network would "route around" the damage! That gives me an idea...
Also, three words: replacement bus service.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:12PM
Very confusing I agree. PIE has flights to say GSO, but GSO has flights to SFB for example, and DEN, and 12 other airports.
And of course you could always drive round the bay (about 15 miles) to TPA.
I'm sure there's some airports that rely on a single route. If KOI shut, then most of the tiny Orkney island airports would have to operate out of say LWI or WIC, but more importantly it's the only airport on the island.
If IPC shut you're really screwed, but even IPC has flights to two separate airports (SCL and PPT), and could easily take planes from anywhere in south america.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrGuy on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:01PM
This is true IF you look at a single airline. Airlines (especially for regional airports) work on a hub and spoke model, with all the flights in/out of regional airports flying into the same regional hub, from which the passengers connect to flights to other destinations.
This does make the traffic in/out of multiple airports in the region dependent on that carrier's regional hub. For example, if Chicago O'Hare went down, American Airlines would have issues servicing traffic from Green Bay, Grand Rapids, Carbondale, etc. As far as AA's network was concerned (which is largely global in scope) those regional airports are easy to cut off.
Except for one thing. Most regional airports are served by more than one carrier.
For example, if AA's hub at O'Hare was cut off, passengers in Green Bay aren't stranded there. They can fly Delta to hubs in Detroit or Minneapolis. Given that different airlines generally have different hubs, the only airports at risk of being "cut off" by a single node going offline are single carrier airports, which are fairly few in number.
This is not dissimilar to the Internet, with multiple backbone carriers providing redundancy to each other.
And even then, those airports tend to be very small regional airports, and there tend to be other small regional airports within a few hours drive, so if you really needed to get somewhere far way, it's inconvenient but far from impossible in most cases. Unless your a tiny carribean island, in which case you might need a boat.
(Score: 1) by mgcarley on Friday April 18 2014, @03:26PM
What happens to passengers on a large swath of passports which are not very good for travel (those who can't get VoA, for example) in the event that an airport were shut down and had to be re-routed to another country (more likely to happen in Europe, Middle East or Asia, but not out of the question in the US or certain parts of Central or South America)?
You've got a person (or group of persons) showing up at an airport where they don't have visas for the new destination country.
And if that airport happens to be small enough to not have an immigration facility, that could be even more problematic as it may not even be possible for them to be granted the necessary transit paperwork. At least not easily.
In such a case, the re-routing could affect them more than just the inconvenience of now having to find land-based transport to reach their originally intended destination (assuming they can't be put on another flight without their having to pass through immigration, of course).
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