The airport system is an important component for the organization of aviation transportation. It is an effective way to analyze the constitution of air transportation and urban systems by identifying the spatial structure of airport system. Centrality is one of the basic methods. Based on network analysis, three common indices, degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality were used to measure centrality for individual cities in the paper. That is to say, "Being central" is not limited to being connected to others, but also being close to all others and being intermediary between others. In the airport system of China, degree centrality shows the "Ding Pattern" for the top class and the "Flyover Effect" for the national network. Closeness centrality makes it measurable for the airport service. Betweenness centrality is a good measure to analyze regional hubs and the core-periphery pattern. On individual cities, Beijing and Shanghai are clearly the top two central cities in all three indices;and rankings on other cities by the betweenness centrality differ significantly from those by the degree and closeness centralities. Based on the three centrality indices, an Exploratory Weighted Method (EWM)were put forward, namely system centrality, to do a further research. The results showed the hierarchical structure with the "Ding Pattern" in the top class and the "Flyover Effect" in the national network. Besides, the spatial pattern by the system centrality accords well with the five airport clusters designed in the National Civil Airports Deployment Plan.
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