Heathrow, the dominant London airport in the BAA group, was down 3.1% compared with June last year, with Stansted, the budget airline hub, down 11.5%.
For example, a connecting flight from San Francisco to New York on United Airlines would mean flying from San Francisco to Denver, or Chicago, or any major airline hub, where you would then disembark and board another plane for another flight from that city to New York.
It is tempting to want the Internet rebuilt to look more like a highly rational, centrally planned version of an airline system's hub-and-spoke model: big users near big content, as many direct routes as possible.
Huntsville is neither a hub for a major airline, nor home to a low-cost carrier.
Now the airline has access to the bustling hub at Atlanta for the first time, and some short-haul international flights.
In most recent airline mergers, at least one hub has suffered deep cuts to its service, such as Cincinnati following the 2008 merger of Delta and Northwest Airlines.
The terminal is critical to the airline's efforts to create a hub for its flights and for those of its partner airlines in the Sky Team alliance.
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Airline mergers are usually about cutting: Hub closings, mass layoffs.
While United, American, Continental, Delta, etc. fought each other toe-to-toe for customers in the hub-and-spoke airline wars (none making any money by the way) Southwest ferried people cheaply between smaller airports on direct flights.
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The government had charged the airline with driving other airlines out of its Dallas hub with extremely low prices.
ExpressJet, which bills itself as the world's largest regional airline, operates as a United Express partner from United's Newark hub.
The Obama administration recognizes that scheduled airlines focus on about 35 hub cities throughout the USA. Servicing rural America is not an airline priority.
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That demand means that virtually every major airline needs to have a presence in Bangkok, which in turn makes it a natural hub for them in Asia.
While bmi regional is losing staffed contract leasing which it carries out for the mainstream part of BMI when it ceases flying between Heathrow and both Edinburgh and Aberdeen, the smaller airline is not bidding for the slots being freed up by regulators for links between the London hub and the east Scottish airports.
Since then, the airline has taken serious measures to improve its efficiency, including rebuilding its luggage system at its Atlanta hub to cut down on lost baggage, and analysing historical cancellation data to adjust the availability of spare aircraft in different hubs in order to keep flights moving.
Rebecca Pace, a former Wachovia rep now in private practice in Cincinnati--a Delta Air Lines hub--says about 25% of her calls over the past year have come from airline families who are scared stiff.
Rebecca Pace, a former Wachovia (nyse: WB - news - people ) rep now in private practice in Cincinnati--a Delta Air Lines (nyse: DAL - news - people ) hub--says about 25% of her calls over the past year have come from airline families who are scared stiff.
There are 15 markets with a United domestic hub on one end and a Continental hub on the other, and 12 of them have seen above-average increases for the merged airline.
"US Airway (currently) loses money on that short segment, but if they can carry that passenger to another major hub or fly them internationally, they capture that incremental revenue, " says Vaughn Cordle, an airline analyst and co-founder of Ionosphere Capital.
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