Geography · Ch 7 — Transport and Communication
Inter-Continental Air Routes
Inter-Continental Air Routes
The world’s inter-continental air routes are not evenly spread across the globe. They are heavily concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, where a distinct east-west belt of routes exists. This belt connects the major economic and population centres of the world.
The densest networks of inter-continental air routes are found in three regions: Eastern United States, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. The dominance of the United States is overwhelming — it alone accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s airways.
A set of key nodal cities act as hubs where air routes converge or radiate out to all continents. These include New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rome, Moscow, Karachi, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
In contrast, several large regions have very poor air services. Africa, the Asiatic part of Russia, and South America all lack adequate inter-continental air connections. …
This map is a global political-physical base map, with continents, oceans, the Tropic of Cancer, and the Tropic of Capricorn clearly labelled. Its single thematic layer is a set of black dots, each representing a major airport, accompanied by a legend reading "MAJOR AIR PORTS". The dots are distributed unevenly across the world, and the map’s purpose is to show where these major air transport hubs are concentrated and where they are sparse.
In the Americas, the densest cluster of dots runs across the northern United States and southern Canada. Labelled cities include Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal in Canada; and Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, New York, Boston, and Miami in the U.S. Further south, dots appear at Mexico City, Caracas, Bogota, Lima, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago — but these are widely spaced, especially across the interior of South America.
Europe shows a very tight cluster of labelled airports: Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. This dense network matches the textbook’s description of a "distinct east-west belt" of inter-continental air routes in the Northern Hemisphere.
Africa’s dots are scattered along the west coast (Dakar, Lagos, Accra), the east coast (Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam), and the southern interior (Lusaka, Harare, Johannesburg, Cape Town). The vast Sahara and central African rainforest have no labelled airports, reflecting the textbook’s point that Africa "lack[s] air services" in large areas.
Asia has the most extensive spread of dots, from the Middle East (Tehran, Jedda, Aden) through South Asia (Karachi, Amritsar, New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Dhaka) and Southeast Asia (Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta, Manila) to East Asia (Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Osaka). A separate chain of dots runs across Russia’s interior: Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, and Tashkent. This pattern shows the textbook’s "dense network" in Southeast Asia and the sparse coverage across the "Asiatic part of Russia." …