> There is no discernible move to a "point to point" model in commercial aviation. That's a myth straight from Boeing's marketing department.
But one doesn't have to just take Boeing's word for it. One can see the trend in the actual real-world routes. For example, you have Norwegian Airlines recently offering direct nonstop service from Oslo Norway to Orlando Florida on the 787.[1] Both Oslo and Orlando would be considered 2nd-tier population cities and that lower demand point-to-point route is made possible by the newer smaller planes.
Before the ETOPS[2] rule changes, an airline had to use the 4-engine jumbo jets to get Norwegians in Europe to Disney World in America. To architect such a route, the airline would choose a prominent "gateway" city in Europe with a superhub such as London Heathrow LHR, or Paris France, or Frankfurt Germany. They then pick a gateway city in USA with a hub such as New York JFK or Atlanta Georgia. The route would then be something like Oslo-to-London-to-NewYork-to-Orlando. That type of hub-&-spoke route was what Airbus was counting on and it didn't happen. The Norwegian Airlines p2p route of Oslo-to-Orlando is a "lost sale" of an Airbus A380.
>suffered from the tripple whammy of 9/11,
But Airbus made their overly optimistic prediction of 1200 orders for the A380 in 2005 which was 4 years after 9/11 2001.
For example, you have Norwegian Airlines recently offering direct nonstop service from Oslo Norway to Orlando, Florida on the 787.
I'd consider Norwegian a bad example since they position themselves as an ultra low cost carrier. The economics there are somewhat different in that they don't usually offer connecting flights via one of their hubs. Ryanair just recently and very tentatively even began offering connecting flights, but it's not necessarily their business model, which is no frills direct connections.
As for major European hubs. Note that they are not necessarilly used by ULC carriers.
I don't know if this is still the case, but when you took Ryanair to Barcelona you wound up in Girona and Stockholm wasn't really Stockholm. Second (or third or fourth) tier airports sometimes offer very attractive conditions to airlines just to get passengers, which make the attractive to ULC carriers.
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.
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.
> I'd consider Norwegian a bad example since they position themselves as an ultra low cost carrier. [...] European hubs [...] not necessarilly used by ULC carriers.
It's not necessary to start the analysis with "ultra low cost carrier" that doesn't use a hub.
Instead, we work backward from the "missing" 900 A380 orders that Airbus thought they'd get but didn't. (If Airbus predicted 1200 sales but only got 300 orders, they were way off on their assumptions.)
By flipping the cause & effect around, we can see the following:
1) The Boeing 787 makes it possible for a ULC like Norwegian Air to not have to partner with British Airways A380 to get their Norway customers from LHR London to JFK New York.
2) the Boeing 787 makes it possible for a ULC like Norwegian Airlines to offer p2p service themselves without buying hub slots
Whether British Airways doesn't buy an additional A380 because Norwegian Airlines isn't sending them any Oslo connecting passengers -- or -- Norwegian doesn't buy an A380 because they don't use hub slots in their ULC business model, the end result is the same: it's an unsold A380.
> But one doesn't have to just take Boeing's word for it. One can see the trend in the actual real-world routes. For example, you have Norwegian Airlines recently offering direct nonstop service from Oslo Norway to Orlando Florida on the 787.[1] Both Oslo and Orlando would be considered 2nd-tier population cities and that lower demand point-to-point route is made possible by the newer smaller planes.
That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that Oslo is Norwegien Airlines' hub, would it? Cause if so, that isn't a point to point route. That is a hub route.
And that's why the trend is illusory. No international airlines are running point to point. The availability of direct routes has to do with the increase in the number of airlines and the number of hubs. Check out Seatac's list of direct international routes. Every single route listed has either a hub destination or a hub origin for that airline. Every single one of them.
> That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that Oslo is Norwegien Airlines' hub, would it?
No, Norwegian does not have a hub. Check out https://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/i/b0pGl/Norwegian-apner-n... for a list of destinations served from the US, and it will include Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, and more. And those are the larger cities, this summer they also fly direct from US to Belfast, Bergen, Dublin, Edinburgh and more, using the 737 MAX.
Southwest doesn't actually have a hub at every city they fly to. They just have a lot of hubs.
They do this by a regional strategy: Nearly every flight goes from a spoke to a hub or focus city (the distinction between the two is irrelevant to the passenger, but relevant to the airline), to another hub or focus city, then ends at a spoke. It's a strategy that has worked out well for them, as it gives them a huge direct flight network despite running what is essentially still a hub and spoke network, because focus cities don't have to have maintenance operations. It's a cool strategy, but only really works regionally because shorter flights mean that they can run multi-leg routes that stop at a full hub at some point. Because it only works regionally, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion in the widebody market.
But one doesn't have to just take Boeing's word for it. One can see the trend in the actual real-world routes. For example, you have Norwegian Airlines recently offering direct nonstop service from Oslo Norway to Orlando Florida on the 787.[1] Both Oslo and Orlando would be considered 2nd-tier population cities and that lower demand point-to-point route is made possible by the newer smaller planes.
Before the ETOPS[2] rule changes, an airline had to use the 4-engine jumbo jets to get Norwegians in Europe to Disney World in America. To architect such a route, the airline would choose a prominent "gateway" city in Europe with a superhub such as London Heathrow LHR, or Paris France, or Frankfurt Germany. They then pick a gateway city in USA with a hub such as New York JFK or Atlanta Georgia. The route would then be something like Oslo-to-London-to-NewYork-to-Orlando. That type of hub-&-spoke route was what Airbus was counting on and it didn't happen. The Norwegian Airlines p2p route of Oslo-to-Orlando is a "lost sale" of an Airbus A380.
>suffered from the tripple whammy of 9/11,
But Airbus made their overly optimistic prediction of 1200 orders for the A380 in 2005 which was 4 years after 9/11 2001.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/blog/2015/03/norwegian-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS