Flight Route Selector
This flight route selector lets you choose two regions from the list of China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Pakistan, and lets you see all the flight connections between them. The red and blue colors are just to make it easier to tell which airports are in which countries. You can also view domestic flights (with the exception of China, as the file is too large and cannot be displayed in Python) for each country. This allows for a lot of interesting insights to be drawn. For example, Japan and Hong Kong share plenty of links for tourism and business, and that can be seen by how you can fly directly from Hong Kong to 12 airports in Japan. Pakistan is a primarily Muslim country, and it only has direct connections to four airports in China- Beijing and Guangzhou, two of China’s most important cities, and Urumqi and Kashgar, which are smaller cities with a large Muslim population in the west of China. Some countries are also much more dependent on domestic flights than other countries. For example, Pakistan, a less wealthy nation that has a decently built-out road network, doesn’t have too many domestic flight routes. Indonesia, on the other hand, is an island nation, meaning flights are the easiest way to get between islands that might not have regular boat service. A lack of flights can also tell you a lot. Many people know about the geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan, so it might not be unexpected that there are no flights between the two countries. However, due to border disputes between India and China, there are also no direct flights between the world’s two most populous countries, despite the demand being there.