Generation and simplicity in the airplane rearrangement group

We study the group TA of rearrangements of the airplane limit space introduced by Belk and Forrest (2019). We prove that TA is generated by a copy of Thompson’s group F and a copy of Thompson’s group T, hence it is finitely generated. Then we study the commutator subgroup [TA; TA], proving that the abelianization of TA is isomorphic to Z and that [TA; TA] is simple, finitely generated and acts 2-transitively on the so-called components of the airplane limit space. Moreover, we show that TA is contained in T and contains a natural copy of the basilica rearrangement group TB studied by Belk and Forrest (2015).