Talk:Airline hub

Rankings
I would love to see a table format that gave the number of daily (or weekly) flights and the number of nonstop (and/or direct) destinations (separate into domestic and international?) for each of the hub operations, but I'm not an expert on Wikipedia formatting, or where to get the data. Maybe OAG? or DOT.gov? (at least for US airlines) Hopefully, if the table were created, people could fill it in over time, ideally with source footnoting and timestamping, so we know how current the data is (the month+year that hub had X daily/weekly flights and Y destinations).

Ryanair
Would someone like to add Ryanair? I think they use Dublin and London-Stansted as hubs, but perhaps someone can confirm and/or add additional primary and/or secondary hubs. -- pne (talk) 08:06, 19 September 2005 (UTC)


 * From what I can gather, I don't think that Ryanair 'hubs'. If you look at the destination map on their website or enter a destination city into the ticket booking bar you'll see that they offer lots of point to point services between their bases (of which they have several) and destination cities (all the yellow dots on the map), but they don't offer any connecting services. This would involve handling and transferring bags etc, and to Ryanair that involves additional cost - which they avoid.
 * This article is written in a way that suggests that all airlines 'hub', which while being mostly true in the USA, isn't always true elsewhere. Many airlines outside the USA simply offer point to point services and avoid hubs, or hub to a much lesser extent than they do in the USA. Sometimes this is because they serve countries that only have one or two major airports and they destinations from those airports without needing to hub, or they simply serve point to point destinations without passing through hubs. Most flights in New Zealand, South Africa and many flights in Australia for example are point-to-point flights, as are most flights in India from what I can gather. I image the same would be true in China. I suspect that many of the airports that are listed in this article aren't actually hubs, but simply bases. -- Adz|talk 13:57, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Most major carriers use hubs to some degree, even if they also have point-to-point service. Air China has a hub in Beijing, South African Airways has one in Jo'burg, Air New Zealand has one in Auckland, etc. However, since Ryanair has no connecting flights, it can't, by definition, have any hubs. DB (talk) 23:10, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
 * A more technically correct description for these cities you described is home base rather than hub. The United States is unique of having large domestic airlines with extensive domestic networks which most other countries lack.  In the case of Air New Zealand, New Zealand is the airline's home country and Auckland is simply the home country's largest city, site of the largest airport and also its home head office.  Most of Air New Zealand's international flights are thus natural to originate from Auckland (interestingly, for domestic flights it is Wellington).  Similar things can be said of Sydney Kingsford-Smith for Qantas, Hong Kong for Cathay Pacific, Singapore for Singapore Airlines (of course).  Because of this it is incorrect to say Auckland is Air New Zealand hub. Similarly, Hong Kong is home to Cathay Pacific so it is of course natural for flights to originate or terminate at the city. If you can read Japanese, go to their equivalent article - there is a debate as to whether it is appropriate to describe Narita as Japan Airlines or ANA's hubs due to difference with US airline industry.--JNZ 02:28, 31 July 2007 (UTC)  PS: A cursory search of the unofficial forum of Sydney Airport  reveals that a vast majority of use of the term hubs by Australian aviation commentators is predominantly on US contexts and very rarely used as such in the Australian industry. --JNZ 07:55, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Now added Ryanair and EasyJet with all their bases (source: Wikipedia/their websites). @Adz: Of course Ryanair and easyJet have hubs, per definition a hub is an airport where an airline has aircraft and crew stationed. - Johanneshahn 17:32, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Then add every french city for Air France or every german for Lufthansa as they actually have crew and plane based there. This definition seems to be biased, a hub is a connection platform. If you don't offer connection, then you are not a hub. I ask to remove Easyjet and Ryanair —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.57.218.1 (talk) 14:34, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Hub Strategic Initiation
It would be worthwhile knowing when the hub concept was initiated. Before there were transcontinental non-stop flights, there were also no hubs. I believe that the hub strategy came about during the age of consolidation of several airlines as a route management tool. Any other thoughts?

Tobyzwiki 04:41, 24 January 2007 (UTC)tobyzwiki

Focus Cities are not Hubs
I've cut the most glaring examples of focus cities in the North America section. To be included here, the airport should be llisted as either hub or secondary hub on the wiki article dealing with the airline. Jon 18:32, 23 May 2007 (UTC)red

Merge with List of hub airports
Arent the lists at this article's section "Major passenger airlines and their hubs", and at List of hub airports the same? If so I think they should be merged. - Nabla 22:43, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Support - I think the list should be merged in here. I like the format of the other list better, although it needs cleaning up as it has quite a bit of false information. People have added airlines as hubbing out of an airport when they have a couple point-to-point flights. DB (talk) 05:30, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
 * REJECT - The two articles are completely different! This article is sorted BY CARRIER!!  The other article is sorted GEOGRAPHICALLY!!  These are HUGE and NON-TRIVIAL differences!  Must keep both articles.  Thanks! --Inetpup 16:43, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Add a picture?
Hello everybody, I created a diagram for an airport hub in the German Wikipedia, if you are interested, I could build up an English captioned version and add it to the article. Just let me know ;-) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Frankfurt_airport_hub_map_v2.png --Upon a tree (talk) 16:42, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Scissors Hub
A Scissors Hub is where a passenger can make a connection from their originating airline to another if the originating airline doesn't have traffic rights in the further area. That was all I could find. There is not much information on what these are out there.Theeditorofallthingswikipedia (talk) 18:58, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

ATL/Delta
Just a note: ATL is not a fortress hub for Delta Airlines. Delta accounts for 56% of operations at ATL according to the Wikipedia article on ATL, which is well below the standard 70% needed for a fortress hub. I'm dropping a note here only because someone added ATL back to the fortress list (months) after I had originally removed it. A fortress hub implies that an airline has monopoly presence at an airport. While the Delta hub at Atlanta is the world's largest hub, ATL is so large that it still is not a monopoly presence. Roothog (talk) 05:00, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

O'Hare
Can someone explain to me how both AA and UA can claim ORD as a "fortress hub"? I know it's the Windy City, but it's not windy enough to carry 140% of its own traffic. 173.196.56.2 (talk) 23:19, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Maintenance facilities
I had somehow gotten the impression that an airline's hub(s) are also where they keep their maintenance crews and facilities. Is that the case, that all hubs do maintenance and non-hubs don't have dedicated maintenance facilities? Abductive (reasoning) 07:05, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

Merge from Focus city
This merge was proposed by back in May; I support it and am adding a discussion here along with a note on the top of this, the destination article.

As far as I can see, the term is essentially a derivative term of "hub". The material on that page is useful, however, and would provide a good template for further expansion of the explanations provided the types listed on this page. Triptothecottage (talk) 06:13, 17 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Support. Focus city a stub, could be reinstated as an independant article if it grows enough.--Marc Lacoste (talk) 06:51, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Support the references at Focus city are generally marketing-speak. A focus city is generally either a small hub, or a marketing buzzword. Power~enwiki (talk) 08:03, 17 July 2017 (UTC)