The fortunes of air transport gateways Kevin O’Connor a,⇑ , Kurt Fuellhart b a The University of Melbourne, Australia b Shippensburg University, United States article info Article history: Received 10 December 2014 Revised 5 June 2015 Accepted 7 June 2015 Available online 15 June 2015 Keywords: Gateway cities Second ranked cities Air networks Metropolitan areas abstract The paper explores the idea that the fortunes of some gateway cities are changing as airlines use modern aircraft to respond to new market opportunities. It uses data on inter-city journeys between Australia and Asia to identify a hierarchy of gateway cities, and then shows how the connections between them has changed over the 2000–2013 period. Results show that secondary, and smaller, gateways in both Australia and Asia have played more important roles in passenger movements over this time. In Melbourne in particular, stronger growth in the demand for international travel in that city along with more use made of the smaller long-haul aircraft by airlines, has strengthened its role as a gateway city relative to Sydney. These results confirm that the geography of inter-continental air networks are chang- ing which may have important implications for the air transport roles of some cities in the immediate future. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The circumstances that surround the vitality of gateway cities, with special attention to those that handle inter-continental long haul flights, are important to – urban areas and their surrounding regions. Though these circumstances have been part of a long her- itage in transportation geography, they also have current relevance as arrangements of inter-continental connections are changing. The research focus on the inter-continental dimension is deliberate as the links that bridge the spaces between the continents have in the past been narrowly focused spatially and so may have the greatest potential for change. They can also have special influences upon the transport functions of the cities, as they may underpin national hub functions. Moreover, long haul inter-continental air travel has a current relevance as it has expanded rapidly in some markets, and in the hands of some carriers, in recent years. This has been felt in the activity of the ‘‘super connectors’’ based largely in the Gulf states (The Economist, 2015) and also in the emergence of long haul Low Cost carriers (LCCs) initially in Asia (Air Asia X, Jetstar) and perhaps soon in the North Atlantic (subject to regula- tory change). For these reasons this research explores the way new arrangements in inter-continental air transport have changed the gateway function of the cities handling air traffic between Australia and Asia, with particular reference to the outcomes at Melbourne, a secondary gateway. Air travel is critical to the inter- national connectivity of Australia, and airports have a significant effect on the vitality of Australia’s cities. Hence an understanding of the roles they play in inter-continental air transport has rele- vance on a variety of fronts. The paper is set up as follows. In the next section we provide a review of the idea of gateway cities in general and the application of the idea to air transport studies, with some particular focus on the global urban hierarchy, regulation, and aircraft technology. This is followed by a brief description of the spatial context of the paper – Australia, and in particular, its links with Asia. We then specify methods and, subsequently, the results of the study. Finally we close the paper with a concluding discussion that suggests the applicability the gateway/second-city focus to a broader set of spa- tial contexts in an era of substantial change in air transport mobil- ity worldwide. 2. The research issues The heritage of the idea of the gateway city was created in his- torical geography where researchers (such as Burghardt, 1971), working on colonial settlement systems, observed the continued role of some first points of contact in subsequent national urban network development. The successful initial settlements often began as seaports moving product into and out of the colonies and became centers of commerce and public administration. A broader framework for these ideas (presented by Taaffe et al. (1963)) showed how port gateways evolved over time in a http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2015.06.013 0966-6923/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Kevin.oconnor@unimelb.edu.au (K. O’Connor), KGFuel@ship. edu (K. Fuellhart). Journal of Transport Geography 46 (2015) 164–172 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Transport Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo