Measuring the structural cost of aviation connectivity relative to income, for every country in the world with an international airport.
In business, runway is the time and capital a company has to grow. In aviation, it is what makes flight possible at all. The Runway Index asks how much of a country's income is spent simply getting airborne, and what that costs the companies trying to reach the world.
It answers one question: how much of a country's monthly income is consumed simply by connecting to its nearest markets and the world's major financial hubs?
A company in Germany can fly to its five nearest regional markets for under 3% of monthly GDP per capita. A company in Tanzania pays over 400%. That gap is structural, not incidental, and almost entirely invisible in standard investment analysis.
Existing aviation indices measure supply: routes, seats, network depth. None normalise cost against the income of the country being measured. The Runway Index fills that gap.
Average cost to the five most economically relevant regional neighbours, selected using a gravity model combining distance and GDP. Captures the regional connectivity constraint relative to income.
Average cost to all twenty cities in the fixed global basket divided by monthly income. Every country is measured against the same reference frame.
All twenty cities are priced for every country. Where no commercial service exists on a route, it is recorded as unpriced and excluded from the average.
Which markets are most structurally constrained by connectivity costs, and how much of their apparent risk premium reflects a connectivity discount that capital has simply never measured.
As the index builds across annual editions, which markets are improving fastest and which are stagnating, producing a concrete measure of whether a country's connectivity position is getting better or worse over time.
Which markets appear well-connected by route count or network depth but are prohibitively expensive relative to local income, and which underrated markets are far more accessible than their reputation suggests.
Whether standard market classification systems predict connectivity reliably, and precisely where they fail. The hypothesis is that some markets classified as emerging or frontier will outscore markets classified as developed, which would be the most direct quantitative challenge to how global capital is currently allocated.
| # | Country | Hub | Local Score | Global Score | Runway Index | Classification |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Germany | FRA | 2.50 | 7.80 | 5.15 | Well Connected |
| 2 | Seychelles | SEZ | 33.87 | 39.84 | 36.85 | Well Connected |
| 3 | Peru | LIM | 21.00 | 108.64 | 64.82 | Moderate |
| 4 | Tanzania | DAR | 211.80 | 642.43 | 427.11 | Very High |
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180+ countries. Full methodology. Free access. Follow on LinkedIn to be notified when the inaugural edition is live.
Follow on LinkedInFlight prices collected via API for Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday departures, booked approximately 30 days in advance. Six prices per route per quarter, averaged. The inaugural edition covers Q2 only. The full 2026 edition published at year end covers Q2, Q3, and Q4. From 2027 all four quarters are collected annually.
The Local Score uses a gravity model to select the five most economically relevant regional neighbours from the eight nearest countries by distance. Gravity score = sqrt(GDP) / distance. Total nominal GDP from IMF DataMapper is used as the economic variable.
The Global Score is measured against a fixed basket of twenty global economic hub cities. All twenty cities are priced for every country. Hub airports are selected as the primary international gateway to the most significant financial centre in each region, not the busiest airport by passenger volume. GDP per capita from IMF DataMapper 2026 estimates, divided by twelve for monthly figures.
Full methodology paper and complete dataset publish alongside the 2026 data.
The Runway Index is the quantitative data publication of Understory Markets, an independent global markets research publication. Where Understory produces deep qualitative intelligence through interviews and field reports, the Runway Index provides the structural data layer underneath. Two formats, one purpose: understanding global markets from the inside.
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