New slimmer and more fuel-efficient planes could spell the end of large hub airports, as direct flights to smaller destinations become increasingly viable.
This shift eliminates the hassle of long layovers and missed connections.
Traditionally, airlines relied on large planes packed with passengers for major international routes to keep costs down.
These flights funneled into major hubs like London Heathrow or New York’s JFK, where roughly half of passengers connect to smaller planes bound for regional destinations.
This ‘hub and spoke’ model, often resulting in long layovers, is now facing disruption as the likes of United make the most of a new breed of passenger planes.
Advanced aircraft like the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Airbus A321XLR can now make cost-effective, long-distance trips to smaller regional airports, bypassing the need for hubs.
For travelers, this means airlines like United will soon offer transatlantic flights from the East Coast to less traditional destinations such as Nuuk, Greenland; Palermo, Italy; and Bilbao, Spain.
‘Smaller, fuel-efficient aircraft like the Boeing 737 Max 8 have enabled new non-stop service to burgeoning niche leisure destinations within reach from the US East Coast,’ United Airlines’ Patrick Quayle told the Financial Times.
United will use smaller jets to make direct trips from the East Coast to places such as Nuuk
‘Our point-to-point portfolio taps into the growing interest in diverse European locales,’ he said.
Flyers are more keen than ever to skip a transfer at a major hub airport after major disruptions have blighted so many since the pandemic, causing massive delays and cancelled trips.
‘We do hear that some passengers are avoiding the very big hubs… where there have been delays,’ Bogi Nils Bogason, Icelandair’s chief executive told the FT.
Indeed, 55 percent of travelers to ten of the world’s busiest hubs were directly at their final destination.
This is an increase from the 50-50 split seen almost a decade earlier, which saw half take a connecting flight onwards, Financial Times analysis of data from OAG showed.
The shift is unlikely to slow, with new aircrafts such as the A321XLR Airbus being taken up by budget airlines in an effort to revamp their route maps.
The A321XLR can fly continuously for 11 hours at a time, or 8,700km, compared to the older A320 Airbus which has a maximum range of 6,300km.
Budget airline Wizz Air plans to use the new Airbus, which can carry up to 244 passengers, for new routes from the UK to Saudi Arabia, the FT reported.
Major airports such as JFK (pictured) connect around half of passengers onto regional flights
United will soon offer transatlantic flights from the East Coast to destinations such as Palermo
‘You could say the business model has always been under threat,’ Thomas Woldbye, chief executive of Heathrow (pictured) told the FT
Other airlines, including Aer Lingus and Iberia, are set to use the model for transatlantic flights.
‘We can fly further into North America on a very fuel-efficient narrow-body aircraft’ Bogason said of the XLR.
Icelandair is considering using the aircraft for flights from its Reykjavik hub to Texas, California and Dubai.
Major airport executives and airlines told the FT that hubs will still play an important role in flight networks.
‘Our hubs will continue to play a vital role in our network,’ United’s Quayle told the publication.
However, there is a growing acceptance that new models will shake up the status quo.
‘You could say the business model has always been under threat,’ Thomas Woldbye, chief executive of Heathrow said.
‘Will we see areas which will be less dependent on hubs, not least because of the XLR? Of course we will. But there is an enormous amount of people who want to travel, many come from areas without major airports. So I don’t think the hub is disappearing,’ he said in November.