Robustness of China’s air transport network from 1975 to 2017

Factors such as inclement weather or manmade destruction greatly impact the traffic efficiency of the whole air transport network. As China’s air transport network (CATN) becomes a large network system, understanding how it will be affected by unexpected events becomes increasingly important. We investigated the robustness of CATN over 40 years due to random failures and targeted attacks, from not only a topological but also a spatiotemporal viewpoint. When subjected to random failures, CATN shows enhanced robustness with more than 80% of airports being required to fail for network paralysis. When subjected to targeted attacks, CATN’s robustness is dominated by 20% of airports. Western parts of CATN are always more vulnerable than the eastern parts, and most long-distance routes fail while short-distance routes are less affected by early attacks. We defined the subnetwork comprising 20% of airports as the trunk network of CATN according to the attacks based on betweenness centrality, which is found to be the most effective way to cause a collapse comparing with attacks based on degree and closeness centrality.