Strictly evolutionary approaches to improving the air transport 
system - a highly complex network of interacting systems - no longer 
suffice in the face of demand that is expected to double or triple 
by 2025. It is necessary to arrive at active design methods.  The 
ability to actively design, optimize and control a system presupposes 
the existence of predictive modeling and reasonably well-defined 
functional dependences among the controllable variables of the system 
and objective and constraint functions for optimization.  We investigate 
functional relationships that govern the performance of transport networks; 
for example, the links between the first nontrivial eigenvalue of a 
network's Laplacian matrix---a quantitative measure of network 
synchronizability---and other global network characteristics with the 
aim of arriving at substantiated modeling, design, and control methods.