A nodal regional analysis of air passenger transport in Europe

The aim of this paper is examining the relations between EU airports and cities from the passengers air transport point of view, observing the polarisation of flows towards some nodes of the European air transport network. The analysis is carried out highlighting nodal regions, obtained observing the interactions among cities and airports pairs in terms of the dominant flows. We use a selection from Eurostat Database of 277 airports and 3,572 routes between airport pairs in the 27 EU countries. Nystuen and Dacey's theory of network analysis is used to explore the characteristics of the 'European sky' to understand how nodal regions appear in terms of dominance of interactions, measured by means of air traffic flows, and what European - regional hierarchies can be observed. The analysis allowed observing both nodal regions centred on airports dominant over international connections, as well as national and local situations, where a node is dominant over national ones.