Resilience of cities towards airport disruptions at global scale

Improving the efficiency and resilience of air transportation is one of the major challenges in the 21st century. Large cities are often in the catchment area of multiple airports. Accordingly, the services at these airports can be comple-mentary or competitive; an airport-specific view of resilience neglects the effects of such interactions. In this study, we analyze the resilience of cities in the presence of airport disruptions. The major research question we address is: How much would the air accessibility of complete cities lose under the outage of a single airport? We perform a study at the global level, comparing the resilience of 5000 largest cities. Two types of passenger-focused measures are proposed to quantify the impact of airport disruption on the air accessibility of cities: The unaffected passengers and the reroutable passengers. We find that some countries have resilient cities, while others are more vulnerable to air-port disruptions. Our study contributes to the literature by a unique combination of city-view, accurate airport-to-city aggregation with road driving distance, and presence of real passenger data.