You do get all the benefits you note, even at spokes. Some of the articles on AA's experience discuss in detail the benefits at the spokes. What you could lose at a sub-scale hub like PIT is connection times, if you are not intelligent. Becaiuse there are far fewer flights than at PHL or CLT, if you have a flat load of flights through the day the avg connect time will go up much more than the 7-12 minute figures that have been quoted.mweiss said:You've piqued my curiosity here. What makes a large number of flights necessary to roll a hub successfully? My sense was that the benefits of rolling a hub are:
1) Reduced turn times (this is where the "extra aircraft" metric shows up)
2) Reduced ground crew, since you have fewer aircraft to service at a time
3) Reduced load on the runway infrastructure, due to fewer movements at a time
Unless you're talking about, say, ten gates in use at a time, I'd think you'd be able to extract these benefits even at a smaller operation.
Could you help me understand what makes PIT too small for this?
Thanks!
However, if it hasn't been done already, there are intelligent ways to "de-peak" a hub like PIT to keep connectivity that is almost as good as it was, but still capture most of the operational efficiencies. You still see waves of flights, but activity os less peaked.