web Musings of The Global Traveller

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Which countries have flights to the most & least number of other countries?

A factor in common for my own travel plans to visit every country, and also in the how to get to series, is that some countries have flight connections with lots of other countries while others do not.

I find it useful to have an idea of how well connected by air various countries are, and based on questions I often get I hope others will find it useful too.

Introducing Flight Connectivity Index (FCI)

To get a quick high level view I have calculated a Flight Connectivity Index (FCI) based on airline schedules at 30 June 2009. The FCI value is the number of other countries to which you can fly directly from a given country, based on published schedules of IATA airlines. Domestic flights do not count. To simplify the calculation, countries are defined as members of United Nations, as opposed to using one of the many other country lists available.

As airline schedules change I intend updating the calculation from time to time.

Selected 30 June 2009 FCI results

There are 192 member countries of the United Nations, thus the maximum possible FCI is 191 (because domestic flights do not count). No country has direct flights to all other countries - the highest FCI score is 106 for Germany. Four countries have a zero flight connectivity index - these are the small countries of Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino. The average across all countries is 23.

The top 10 flight connectivity index values at 30 June 2009 are equal to or greater than 68, and the bottom 10 are equal to or less than 3. There are 57 countries with a FCI of 9 or less, 3 countries with a FCI of 100 or more (Germany, France, UK) and 17 countries with a FCI score of 50 or more.

The countries with the highest and lowest FCI values are shown in the two tables below.

Flight Connectivity Index (FCI) - Top 10
as at 30 June 2009


Flight Connectivity Index (FCI) - Bottom 10

as at 30 June 2009

No flights
San Marino
183=2Marshall Islands
North Korea

Full Flight Connectivity Index

I've posted the full Flight Connectivity Index at 30 June 2009.


mickc said...

Interesting concept and very interesting results. One quick thought on the methodology - and not one that invalidates it at all, as you did specify countries not states or regions. The results will (inevitably) favor Europe as it has a high concentration of small(ish) countries.

It would be interesting to throw in a few arbitrary regions and repeat the analysis. For example group Germany, France, Benelux together as a single region, but break out the US into NE, SE, West coast and a joint central/mountain timezone region. I do not know SE Asia well enough to suggest any breakout there.

An alternate might be to keep the country breakout but throw out the domestic/international flight designation and instead bring in am arbitrary distance or time measure. Maybe 4 hours so that US transcontinental flights count, along presumably with Russian and Australian internal flights? I suspect the US might go up, UK stays about the same, while Germany/France go down? (I do not know the connectivity of mainland Europe gateways to the Asian/African routes so cannot guess ahead of results).

Anonymous said...

Would you publish the whole list?

I would have imagined Singapore to be a major player too.

The Global Traveller said...

The next post has the full list. Apologies for not including a link - I'll add it now.