Visual Exploration of Us Domestic Airline Market Structures

With the wide-spread adoption of information technology and the global diffusion of GIS, a large volume of digital spatial data continues to accumulate. In the field of domestic air travel, aggregate data at a fine geographic resolution have become available. For instance, ever since the enactment of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, all large certified domestic air carriers conducting scheduled passenger operations (except helicopter carriers) in the US are required to participate in a Passenger Origin and Destination Survey (GAO, 2003). The reports submitted by each air carrier are then compiled by the Office of Airline Information (OAI) of US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to form a database, called the Airline Origin and Destination Survey (DB1B). This database contains a 10 percent sample of all airline tickets from all the reporting carriers by quarter each year. DB1B data tables from 1993 to 2005 are currently accessible to the public at the BTS website (http://www.bts.gov). DB1B data consist of three files, DB1BCoupon, DB1BMarket, and DB1BTicket, of which DB1BMarket is the most useful for studying US domestic airline markets. DB1BMarket contains information related to passenger travel by air from an origin airport to a destination airport. An origindestination pair is often characterized as a directional market in that it is defined by the first departure airport on a ticket and the ultimate arrival airport. In this sense, the study of airline directional markets fits in the framework of spatial interaction research. In DB1BMarket files, other main data items include number of passengers, fare, and distance for each directional market. Due to its fine geographic details (at the airport level), this database can reasonably be expected to contain a wealth of information that could provide unparalleled insights into the formation of airline market structures over time and across space. DB1BMarket is the significant data source for studying US domestic air traffic patterns and airline market structures. In fact, a more widely used dataset in airline research, known as the Consumer Air Fare Report (http://ostpxweb.dot.gov/aviation/), is a derivation from this database.