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Paris is the most vital connection point for global air travel - report

Paris, France is the most important connection point for international air travel, according to a recent study.

A team of researchers, led by Luis Amaral of Northwestern University, reportedly analysed the connections from 3,883 communities with airports globally. According to the results Paris was the most important connection point, with Anchorage, Alaska being the second most important. Next on the list were London, UK, Singapore and New York, USA.

The results have been published in the latest issue of 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Science', according to The Associated Press.

According to Amaral, the results are important for the understanding of how new diseases would potentially move and for the flow of travellers. The researcher also said that the results would help in finding airports where more competition is needed.

While the study found that a traveller can travel between any of the cities in the study with an average of 4.4 flights, more than 50% of the studied communities are linked by four flights or less. The most difficult route however was from Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands to Wasu, Papua New Guinea - requiring 15 separate flights.

The measure used to determine the importance of an airport was 'centrality', which is a rating of the shortest paths between any two cities, involving a transfer at a certain city. This means that the busiest airports are not always the most important ones.

The study also found that Paris and London, benefitting from the countries' colonial past, were at the top for direct flights to other destinations - with Paris having flights to 250 other cities, London to 242; Frankfurt, Germany to 237; Amsterdam, the Netherlands to 192 and Moscow, Russia to 186.

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