Dynamics of the US domestic airline network during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had serious impacts on the airline industry. Understanding the network dynamics of individual airlines is essential for discussing aviation policies in emergent situations to achieve both ensuring network connectivity and maintaining competition among airlines. In this study, we quantitatively reveal the day-to-day dynamics of the US domestic airline networks consisting of 17 airlines from January 2019 to December 2021. Specifically, we applied a framework for analyzing temporal networks, in which network structure changes over time. First, we found that, even though the number of nodes and edges returned to the pre-pandemic levels around July 2021, the structure of the entire US domestic airline network had been still largely different from the pre-pandemic structure. We also found that the network dynamics varied significantly from airline to airline. Full-service carriers are less flexible in changing their network structure and suffer higher revenue losses. On the contrary, most regional carriers completely shifted to new structure, which may contribute to reduce their revenue losses. Low-cost carriers are characterized by more pronounced differences between airlines and drastically changed their network structure immediately after the declaration of national emergency.