Abstract: To study the impact of COVID-19 on passenger airline network of capital cities in China, the COVID-19 data nationwide from November 2020 to January 2021 is collected and the development of COVID-19 is divided into three stages, i.e., the regular prevention and control stage, the mild outbreak stage, and the serious outbreak stage. Moreover, social network analysis method is used to analyze the data. The key findings are as follows: (1) When the leading capital cities in the network break out mild COVID-19, the network influence of their nearby capital cities that are equipped with developed railway network will increase. However, when these cities break out serious COVID-19, all of the capital cities’ network influence will decrease. (2) The mild outbreak of COVID-19 in the popular tourist provinces will increase the network influence of the capital cities of other tourist provinces. (3) The high network control power of a capital city reflects the bottleneck of the network in terms of transferring passengers. Furthermore, as the COVID-19 spreads, operating new temporary short-haul flights in central and eastern China can effectively break the network bottleneck. 

Key words:  COVID-19, capital cities, passenger airline network, social network analysis