Multiple airport regions based on inter-airport temporal distances

We formulate and implement a new metric for identifying multiple airport regions (MARs) around the world, based on the temporal distance between airports. This metric, opposed to existing studies based on spatial distance, takes into account the real travel time between airports of latent passengers and their journeys via ground transportation. We investigate a variety of properties of the newly built MARs network at the global scale for the year 2015, including the importance of MARs in global air transportation, similarity clustering, destination overlap, and airport roles inside a MAR. Commonalities and differences to the simplified spatial distance are identified.