What?
For ground-based connections, determine reliably whether airports and locations belong to the same island or another area that is effectively separated from neighboring ones. Prevent connections between locations that are separated and apply minimum distances for all others.
Examples:
- There might be air traffic between Tenerife and Gran Canaria (different islands), but not between the two airports on Tenerife (same island, too close).
- Passengers in Austria might consider flying from Munich, Germany (Schengen area).
- A passenger from South Korea likely won’t consider connections from North Korea (hard border).
- Passengers from the French part of St. Martin will fly from SXM on the Dutch side (soft border).
Why?
Ground networks (both in the existing system as well as with the new location-based demand) suffer from annoying artefacts caused by an imperfect definition of ground networks. All we got at the moment is exclusively airport-based and requires manual definition of all prohibited airport pairs.
When?
Anytime, although a proper solution will require some engineering effort and it will likely take a while until I get around to it.
