The spatial distribution and network characteristics of airports in mainland China were analyzed

then improved average travel time was used to analyze airport accessibility and correlation analysis method is adopted to study transport

service

operations and environment. The results showed that airports density in the east is larger than that in the west region. There are 27 airports with more than 1 000 flights in a week

among them 22 airports are located in provincial capital cities

and only 5 airports are in non-provincial capital cities

i.e. Shenzhen

Xiamen

Dalian

Qingdao and Sanya

respectively. The top three of the busiest routes are those between Shenzhen-Beijing

Shenzhen-Shanghai and ShanghaiBeijing

and main departure & destination cities for the top 20 of the busiest routes are Shanghai

Beijing

Shenzhen

Chengdu

Chongqing

Guangzhou and Xiamen. From the perspective of accessibility

eastern regions show higher accessibility than western regions in China. High accessibility areas include Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei

the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. Furthermore

the airport accessibility is often affected by transport

service

operations and environment

among which the most important factors are related to number of connected airports

outbound flights in peak hours

outbound domestic direct-flights and actual outbound flights. The correlation values are 0.706

0.822

0.777 and 0.808

respectively. The accessibility also has a strong correlation with number of parking

number of runways

GDP and population

with correlation values of 0.776

0.701

0.679 and 0.695

respectively.