Why do airlines have hubs?

[aphex]

?

 

[Rastus]

So they can centralize their maintenance and administration functions.

 

[Lord Evermore]

It's cheaper to have a bunch of flights go to a central hub, where passengers can be consolidated to use the plane space more efficiently, then to their destination. Otherwise you have to have an entire airline and airport staff as well as every single piece of equipment at every single airport, whether they get 10 flights a day or 100 flights a day.

Say there's a "doohickey" that every plane has to be serviced by. It ends up being cheaper to have 5 doohickeys at the hub, servicing 1000 planes a day, than to have 50 doohickeys at 50 airports, each servicing only 20 planes a day and the rest of the time sitting idle. The planes may have to fly a little farther in some cases to reach the hub, but it's still cheaper. And in some cases you end up flying way out of the straight-line path to your destination but it still ends up cheaper for the airline.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Also allows control of the passenger loads better.

Half full from point->point with directs.

By merging departure points, you can then get 3/4 full on all planes.

 

[Sukhoi]

It also allows more regional flights with less connections. If I fly out of my college airport I can get to any city in the world (almost literally) with one connection. If airlines had point-to-point service everywhere I'd probably have 3+ flights just to get home.

 

[drinkmorejava]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
It's cheaper to have a bunch of flights go to a central hub, where passengers can be consolidated to use the plane space more efficiently, then to their destination. Otherwise you have to have an entire airline and airport staff as well as every single piece of equipment at every single airport, whether they get 10 flights a day or 100 flights a day.

Say there's a "doohickey" that every plane has to be serviced by. It ends up being cheaper to have 5 doohickeys at the hub, servicing 1000 planes a day, than to have 50 doohickeys at 50 airports, each servicing only 20 planes a day and the rest of the time sitting idle. The planes may have to fly a little farther in some cases to reach the hub, but it's still cheaper. And in some cases you end up flying way out of the straight-line path to your destination but it still ends up cheaper for the airline.

That's the point, however the problem with hubs is then you have to bring everyone to the hub for flights. So then airlines become forced to fly to desitinations where they lose money in order to keep enough people going through the hubs.

 

[effee]

Yep, but with the introduction of longer range and bigger planes, we might see connections end altogether?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Except that they're afraid to put enough fuel on a jet anymore to make more than a hop. And still there's the issue of needing to make sure the plane is full. It wastes a lot of fuel to make a flight all the way across the continent with only half the seats full. The amount of fuel needed to carry the passengers needed to fill those seats is small compared to the fuel needed to get into the air and fly in the first place.