The point-to-point system may be ideal for travellers from bigger cities; but in smaller cities, the only hope for links to a variety of destinations is the hub-andspoke model. In a country as large and diverse as India, traffic patterns differ markedly from region to region. For hassle-free journeys, both hub-and-spoke and point-to-point networks need to be available.

Air travel began “as the crow flies”, point-to-point, with flights proceeding from one airport straight to another. Any intervening halt was only for refuelling, urgent maintenance or to pick up more passengers. After World War II, however, commercial aviation flourished in the United States and the number of airports started to increase exponentially. It soon became practically impossible to link each airport directly to all other airports even within a relatively small region of that huge country. Besides many flights connecting small and isolated communities routinely operated half empty, which resulted in airlines losing money.

In 1955, Delta Airlines pioneered the hub-and-spoke model, named after the bicycle wheel it graphically resembles. It made air transportation more efficient by greatly simplifying a complex network of routes. In this system, passengers were conveyed in small aircraft from several outlying airports (spoke points) to the nearest major airport (hub) from where they were flown in larger planes to the hub nearest to their desired destination. The hub-and-spoke model is now extensively used for both passengers and freight in many parts of the world. And the credit for popularising it goes not to a passenger airline but to the iconic American air freight company FedEx.

Efficiency or Convenience?

A genuine hub-and-spoke system, yet to materialise in India, is the most efficient template from the airlines’ point of view because it enables the least number of aircraft to connect to the greatest number of airports. For instance, in a system with 10 destinations, the spoke-to-hub scheme requires just nine routes to connect all points, while a true point-to-point network would require 45 routes (each airport connecting the other nine). The small number of routes promotes more efficient use of scarce resources, especially aircraft and crew. The aircraft are more likely to be filled to capacity and can fly the same route more than once a day. But this may not yet hold good in India since smaller airports must be content with just one or two flights per day.

At the hub, centralised operations also lead to economies of scale. However, there’s something in human nature that detests detours. Isn’t a journey performed walking, cycling or by car, kept as straight as possible, from beginning to end? Pointto-point, one might say. It is not that hub-and-spoke travel is a new concept. From the time when ships, trains and buses became common, passengers had to make their way to a nearby port, railway station or bus terminus (call it a hub), then perform a much longer journey to reach another “hub”. But if a direct flight is available, no traveller willingly chooses to add legs to the journey, because it means more delay, more inconvenience and more chances of lost baggage or missed connections. So airlines make the hub-and-spoke system palatable to passengers by reducing the ticket price. In this way, they pass on some of the financial benefit of their increased operational efficiency. Besides they sweeten the deal by offering frequent, good, seamless connections that are on time, with friendly and helpful staff hovering nearby. In India, however, hub-andspoke routeing is still expensive, which partly accounts for its lack of popularity.

Complexity or Simplicity?

From the scheduling point of view, hub-and-spoke operations can create something of a logistical nightmare at hub airports with dozens of incoming and outgoing flights needing to be closely scheduled to minimise delays between connections. This results in excessive traffic during peak hours and can overwhelm scarce airside facilities like taxi tracks or runways. A minor delay at one hub (caused, for instance, by bad weather or traffic congestion so common at India’s metros) can have a cascading effect on the rest of the hub-and-spoke connections. Interruption even at a single spoke (perhaps due to an aircraft technical fault) can also affect smooth running of its hub. Hubs are expensive to operate and they cannot tolerate holdups or inefficiency.

A point-to-point system offers quick, easy and simple connections between major cities. It minimises connections and travel time. There’s no interdependency of flights—a delayed flight or a closed airport will not significantly affect other flight schedules, and delays are unlikely to cascade through the system. Nowadays, low-cost carriers (LCC) are proliferating. They prefer to shun major hubs and operate in isolation from one low-cost airport to another.

Most airlines find it very difficult to make money from shorthaul operations. The ticket prices are invariably high and many passengers baulk at paying, preferring to travel by high-speed rail or road, especially if the journey does not take too much time. However, short-haul flights are obviously an essential part of the hub-and-spoke model. The only airlines that have to some extent managed to make profit from short-haul flights, are efficient LCCs. That is why low-cost players have come to dominate many short-haul markets across the globe, turning these services into a true mass transportation facility.