Zusammenfassung
Resilience of most critical infrastructures against failure of elements
that appear insignificant is usually taken for granted. The World
Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that reduces the geographical
gap between societies, both small and large, and brings forth economic
gains. With the extensive use of a publicly maintained data set that
contains information about airports and alternative connections between
these airports, we empirically reveal that the WAN is a redundant and
resilient network for long distance air travel, but otherwise breaks
down completely due to removal of short and apparently insignificant
connections. These short range connections with moderate number of
passengers and alternate flights are the connections that keep remote
parts of the world accessible. It is surprising, insofar as there exists
a highly resilient and strongly connected core consisting of a small
fraction of airports (around 2.3%) together with an extremely fragile
star-like periphery. Yet, in spite of their relevance, more than 90% of
the world airports are still interconnected upon removal of this core.
With standard and unconventional removal measures we compare both
empirical and topological perceptions for the fragmentation of the
world. We identify how the WAN is organized into different classes of
clusters based on the physical proximity of airports and analyze the
consequence of this fragmentation.
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