  The air transportation network, a fundamental component of critical
infrastructure, is formed from a collection of individual air carriers, each
one with a methodically designed and engineered network structure. We analyze
the individual structures of the seven largest passenger carriers in the USA
and find that networks with dense interconnectivity, as quantified by large
k-cores for high values of k, are extremely resilient to both targeted removal
of airports (nodes) and random removal of flight paths paths (edges). Such
networks stay connected and incur minimal increase in an heuristic travel time
despite removal of a majority of nodes or edges. Similar results are obtained
for targeted removal based on either node degree or centrality. We introduce
network rewiring schemes that boost resilience to different levels of
perturbation while preserving total number of flight and gate requirements.
Recent studies have focused on the asymptotic optimality of hub-and-spoke
spatial networks under normal operating conditions, yet our results indicate
that point-to-point architectures can be much more resilient to perturbations.
