Understanding BFS and DFS using an Airline Flight Routes

In this demonstration, we explore how graph traversal algorithms can model real-world networks using a familiar example - a map of flight routes between major U.S. cities. Each airport in our program is represented as a vertex, and each flight route is a directed edge connecting one city to another. By using Breadth-First Search (BFS) and Depth-First Search (DFS), we’ll visualize how a computer can systematically explore all possible flight paths from a starting location, such as Dallas. BFS will help us determine how many “hops” it takes to reach each destination, while DFS will show how the program follows a single route at a time, diving deep before backtracking to explore alternatives. This realistic scenario bridges theory and practice, showing how graph algorithms power navigation systems, airline route planning, and network analysis in the real world.