Abstract: In order to maintain flight safety and improve the efficiency of air route operations in the event that severe weather, military activities or other factors may have a significant, negative effect on the safety or the efficiency, a fishbone directional weighted air route network model was built based on the complex network theory for a single complete route and its connections. Degree, weight, betweeness were identified as the indicators of network invulnerability. The characteristics of the indexes and the invulnerability of the network were analyzed for two kinds of attacks, a deliberate nodes deletion attack and a random nodes deletion attack. Then, the route A593 was selected as an example to verify the model. The results show that the directed weighted fishbone air route network has a negative matching feature with larger-degree nodes prefer to connect smaller-degree nodes, and that the invulnerability of an air route network to a deliberate nodes deletion attack according to the degree, weight and betweeness is lower than its invulnerability to a random nodes deletion attack.

Key words: air route network, complex network theory, invulnerability, feature analysis, overall network efficiency, nodes deletion attack