6 ms·

Isn't that just more evidence of the rise of point-to-point airlines? Ryanair mostly don't have hubs and Boeing is selling them massive orders of 737s. Same w

Isn't that just more evidence of the rise of point-to-point airlines? Ryanair mostly don't have hubs and Boeing is selling them massive orders of 737s. Same with AirAsia, which does have some focus cities (KUL) but can largely be considered point-to-point. Now that long-haul LCCs are becoming a thing, they're buying up 787s, like Norweigian and AirAsiaX. By not using hubs, they need more aircraft like the 787 and 737MAX. Then there are all the mainland Chinese carriers who are effectively taking this strategy out of necessity. Chinese aviation authorities prohibit a given international city pair from being served by more than one Chinese airline, which is part of why we're seeing a lot of those airlines show up in second tier cities even if the route doesn't serve their own hub in China. E.g., XiamenAir serving Seattle-Shenzen and Hainan Airlines serving Chongqing-Rome.

skgoa 9y ago
The issue with this entire line of discussion is that growth in the number of p2p routes alone isn't what we should be looking at, but the market share of those routes compared to total numbers of passengers. When you look at the entire picture, you quickly see that the hub-2-hub trunk routes have also grown rapidly. And when you look deeper, you can see that many trunk routes are more or less maxed out on flights. That's because many major airports can't handle more starts/landings or they don't grand more starting/landing slots to airlines to schedule new flights. The only way to grow these routes is through going to bigger planes. tl;dr: There are more flights happening all over the place, but p2p routes' passenger numbers aren't outgrowing h2h routes' numbers.