Tutorial
2.b. Efficiency and Aviation Capacity
The hub-and-spoke system has evolved over time under the design of the airline companies for their own ease in operations. It also has served to keep the cost down for maintaining their fleet.
Hub-and-spoke works like this: Each major airline establishes one major metropolitan airport as its main hub of operations. This is the site where most of the fleet is kept and maintenance is performed. The company's headquarters is usually found in the city nearby. Typically, nearly all of that particular airline's flights are routed through this hub. Depending upon the distance covered by an airline's operations, an airline could have more than one hub.
 This is a route map for a major airline. Notice that it has major hubs in the cities of Newark, NJ and Houston, TX and also a minor hub in Cleveland, OH. |
Along with this hub-and-spoke system is a pattern of designated airways.
These airways are noted as vectors on aeronautical charts. Nearly all commercial
jetliners are required to fly within these airways. These vectors are not direct
routes that lead from one metropolitan airport to another, but act more like
a major highway in the sky from which jetliners are directed to change heading
and then descend through common descent corridors to follow an approach route
to their destination airport below. Many aircraft are given this same descent
vector and are combined to form one line of aircraft heading to the same destination
airport. These vectors often do not always take advantage of jet stream flow,
but are merely standard routes that are regularly assigned and flown.
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