Airlines and Spatial Geography

Once upon a Tuesday afternoon, I went on that all-necessary daydreaming stretch during my studies. I regularly frequent a website called Flightradar.com, which shows the present position and destination of every flight around the world. As a frequent flyer to India, specifically Maharashtra (a state on the western coast), I was curious to see the status of the Air India 144 flight from New York to Mumbai, a city in Maharashtra 50 kilometers north of my father's hometown of Alibaug.

A Boeing 777-200LR of Air India, which operates flight 144

Low and behold, the flight had relocated from Mumbai to Delhi!

Our family has relied on flight 144 since its inception in 2010 for flights to India as it was the only non-stop to South Asia not operating to the Republic's capital.

Thinking about such a change made me instantly consider why such a flight was cancelled. It turned out that a second flight to New York from Ahmedabad, Gujarat was started just two months back, so to avoid geographic cannibalism between the two routes, the other flight was rerouted north to Delhi.

To be honest, the first thing I did was typed in "wikipedia.com" on my laptop and searched, without caps, "usa gujarati population." It turned out that I was fascinated, but not surprised, that the number of Gujaratis in the USA outnumbered the number of Maharashtrians more than 10 times! Not only that, Telugu and Tamils, Urdus and Punjabis, coming from 4 other respective states in India, outnumbered even the Gujaratis!

Knowing my cousins back "home" in India, the Maharashtrians seem to have a sentiment of leaving the country. Despite the IT boom currently enveloping India, Maharashtra was already better developed than most other regions with a greater exodus diaspora in the USA. Staying just 50 kilometers south in a fishing village made Mumbai a big departure from what most would consider to be "actual India." I remember that scary moment that our TATA Sumo SUV was within 1 foot from falling off a thousand foot cliff, events that would never occur in Mumbai.

Only then did it dawn upon me that Airlines not only look at the relative populations of cities served by their flights, but also what demographics those cities serve. Eastern New Jersey has its historic rocks in place, but Gujarati and Telugu Indians have truly acting as the sand between the rocks. They can be seen everywhere, to the point that an entire street, Oak Tree Road, serves as a Gujarati version of Penn State's College Avenue.

Apna Bazar, perhaps the most popular Indian grocery store in the country, caters to the Gujarati population of Oak Tree Road.

I have to confess that us Maharashtrians do not effectively act as dense sand between the perennially staying rocks of America's first settlers. In my entire city of 100,000, there are only 4 Maharashtrian families, all of which we know and all whose surname ends with the letter e. (Fun fact: most Indians with a surname ending with e, they are probably Maharashtrian or Konkani!) Many of my friends in those all-essential childhood Diwali dance groups were Gujarati or Telugu, so the airlines only had to connect to the majority's desires to stay successful!

After such a realization of reality dawned upon me, I was still surprised, but in another way: why did Air India fly to Mumbai for so long?!