It would depend on the type of aircraft. Take a moderate sized city like Buffalo, NY. Not a small place. It enjoys 8 daily direct flights on United to ORD and IAD. The IAD flights are all RJs, with 2 RJ and 2 narrow-body ORD flights. There's no doubt that some of the turns could be an hour or more at both the spoke and the hub. But from United's perspective, BUF is served with essentially two planes. The question is, how else would you serve Buffalo with two planes? Of course, my point is that the majors have been trying so hard to work their hub-n-spoke networks that they've missed flying modest sized planes directly between the cities where people want to go. United/AA/NW/USAir have all been focused in using their lower-cost RJ contractors to provide a similar (or less) number of flights into Buffalo sized cities. Few of them appear to have been looking at taking pax around their hubs; like United doing a BUF->Indianapolis run. I'm guessing it's no coincidence that all of the successful "profitable" airlines are still all established in large O&D markets (JetBlue-JFK, AirTran-ATL, ATA-Chicago, Frontier-Denver and even HP at Phoenix.) Matthew On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 02:50 PM, damiross2@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: >> The idea was that an airline could do two things with a Hub/n/Spoke >> system, that with the same # of planes one could: >> >> a) Serve more destinations >> b) Serve them more frequently >> >> ... and that by using a hub it would be cheaper than running >> point-to-point and avoid suffering poor aircraft utilization, and >> possibly lots of empty seats. > Have to disagree on this - hub-and-spoke contribute to poor aircraft > utilization. > Aircraft which could be turned around in 30-40 minutes may stay at the > hub for > an hour or more. 20-30 extra minutes on the ground may not seem like > much but > it does add up during the course of a day. > > Also, if there is a disruption at a hub airport due to weather, > blocked runway, or > whatever, then the aircraft utilization goes down even more and the > entire > system is screwed up because of one airport. > > David R