New planes will help passengers avoid congestion at hub airports

Airlines are reshaping their networks with new aircraft, and more and more passengers are flying direct, bypassing congested airports.

Since the dawn of the jet age, airlines have been flying large, fuel-hungry planes on transcontinental routes. These connect larger airports, before passengers transfer to smaller aircraft to connect within a region.

But the development of aircraft technology has put this “communication and speech” model under pressure.

Airlines can now use smaller and more efficient single-aisle aircraft, normally associated with short trips, on longer trips, opening up direct routes that are uneconomical with larger aircraft.

Next summer, United Airlines transatlantic travelers will be able to fly directly from the US East Coast to destinations such as Bilbao in Spain, Palermo in Italy and even Greenland.

“Smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft like the Boeing 737 Max 8 have enabled new nonstop service to expand reachable destinations from the US East Coast,” said Patrick Quayle, United Airlines’ senior vice president of global network planning and alliances.

“Our point-to-point portfolio continues to grow in demand across Europe,” he said.

Other senior airline executives said that even if the main airport is not dead, passengers will prefer to bypass larger airports because of the disruptions that have plagued many busy hubs since the outbreak.

“We have heard that some passengers are moving away from the bigger hubs. . . where there were delays,” said Bogi Nils Bogason, CEO of Icelandair.

The changes over the past decade have brought about a change in how passengers use major airports.

Last year, 55 percent of people who flew through the world’s 10 international airports flew directly to their destination, rather than connecting between flights. That was up from around 50-50 in 2015, according to a Financial Times analysis of data from aviation analytics firm OEG.

The trend is set to go even further with the arrival of the ultra-long-haul Airbus single-aisle A320 family, which offers a high level of performance. The plane made its first commercial flight in November.

The A321XLR can carry up to 244 passengers and has a maximum range of 4,700 nautical miles (8,700 km) or 11 hours of flight time; It can carry 12,900 liters of kerosene with the addition of an additional fuel tank. This compares to the older A320’s maximum range of 3,400 nautical miles.

Low-cost European airlines Wizz Air, Aer Lingus and Iberia fly the plane across the Atlantic.

Christian Scherrer, head of Airbus’ commercial aircraft division, said the XLR’s arrival was “the first time in a long time that a new aircraft with new capabilities has come to market”.

“So even though it’s a 321 result, it’s a big deal that it opens up a whole new (range) of options in that aircraft size category,” he told the Financial Times.

The arrival of the XLR will create new opportunities, says Icelandair’s Bogason. We can fly further into North America with a fuel efficient narrow body aircraft.

The airline is considering flights from its Reykjavík hub to Texas, California and Dubai when the planes arrive.

“When the price is low, it’s less risky to start something new,” he said.

Airline and airport executives agree that hub airports play an important role in flight networks by being the most efficient in connecting large numbers of people and placing flights on popular routes at high frequencies.

“Our hubs continue to play a vital role in our network,” said United’s Quayle.

London Heathrow Airport said he expects it in December A very busy holiday seasonWith a record number of passengers scheduled to pass through the month.

But even downtown airport officials admit the terrain is changing.

“You could say the business model is always under threat,” said Thomas Woldby, chief executive of Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest hubs.

“Will we at least see places that are less dependent on hubs because of XLR? Of course we will. But there are a lot of people who want to travel, many of them coming from areas that don’t have major airports. So I don’t think the hub is going away,” he told an industry conference in November.