How Flight Delays Spread From Airport to Airport Like a Disease

Researchers studying air travel congestion have typically focused on a handful of hubs, those problem airports that seem to routinely struggle getting flights on and off the ground on time (we’re looking at you, Newark and JFK). Air travel congestion, however, is really more a phenomenon built on networks of airports than any individual one. In fact, it may be most useful to think of flight delays spreading across a region of the United States in the same way that disease travels through our connections to each other.

"Our approach was more from epidemiology, from epidemics spreading," says Pablo Fleurquin, a researcher with the Spanish National Research Council. He and several colleagues recently published a study in the journal Scientific Reports analyzing air travel congestion in more than 8 million domestic flights in the United States in 2010.