Structural properties of the Chinese air transportation multilayer network

• We investigate the structural properties of the Chinese air transportation multilayer network (ATMN).
• We compare two main types of layers corresponding to major and low-cost airlines.
• It is found that small-world property and rich-club effect of the Chinese ATMN are mainly caused by major airlines.

Recently multilayer networks are attracting great attention because the properties of many real-world systems cannot be well understood without considering their different layers. In this paper, we investigate the structural properties of the Chinese air transportation multilayer network (ATMN) by progressively merging layers together, where each commercial airline (company) defines a layer. The results show that the high clustering coefficient, short characteristic path length and large collection of reachable destinations of the Chinese ATMN can only emerge when several layers are merged together. Moreover, we compare two main types of layers corresponding to major and low-cost airlines. It is found that the small-world property and the rich-club effect of the Chinese ATMN are mainly caused by those layers corresponding to major airlines. Our work will highlight a better understanding of the Chinese air transportation network.