Resilience analysis of cities' air accessibility under disruptions

Air transportation stands as an indispensable pillar of a city's economy. An effective and reliable air transport service plays an important role for the prosperity of a city. Moreover, in many cases, a city has multiple airports within its catchment area and the collaborative relationships under disruptions between these airport services have often been overlooked in prior studies. To bridge this gap, this paper firstly introduces the concept of “instant air accessibility” for a city and develops a resilience metric aimed at quantifying the impact of airport disruptions on a city's air accessibility, taking into account the perspective of a multi-airport system. We apply the metrics to a network with 48 cities at or above the second-tier level in China. Results of the air accessibility analysis show that some relatively small cities have high accessibility that are comparable to megacities in China, but some provincial capital cities have low accessibilities, although they maintain superior political and economic status among the cities. Most of the cities' accessibility are vulnerable to targeted disruptions. Additionally, we identify critical airports that wield significant influence over the overall accessibility performance of the entire network. The findings from this study offer valuable insights for the management of air transport resources and the enhancement of the resilience of cities' air accessibility. • Considers factors beyond traditional metrics, including airport locations, number of airports, and flight distribution among them. • Provides insights for identifying business opportunities and strategic planning to enhance urban competitiveness. • Created a resilience metric to assess the impact of disruptions on a city's air accessibility, considering complementary relationships among multiple airports. • Incorporates time attributes of the air transport system. • Investigated the impact of flight distribution across airports on the resilience of a city's air accessibility.