Universal bursty behavior in the air transportation system

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Social activities display bursty behavior characterized by heavy-tailed inter-event time distributions. We examine the bursty behavior of airplanes' arrivals in hub airports. The analysis indicates that the air transportation system universally follows a power-law inter-arrival time distribution with an exponent α=2.5 and an exponential cutoff. Moreover, we investigate the mechanism of this bursty behavior by introducing a simple model to describe it. In addition, we compare the extent of the hub-and-spoke structure and the burstiness of various airline networks in the system. Remarkably, the results suggest that the hub-and-spoke network of the system and the carriers' strategy to facilitate transit are the origins of this universality.