(light music)
- When I look at a map, I see opportunity.
- [Narrator] This is Patrick Quayle.
He's a global network planning executive
(Patrick speaking indistinctly on background)
at United Airlines
which means he decides where the airline flies,
when it flies, and what type of aircraft it flies.
- I can talk about planes forever.
- [Narrator] Quayle has more than 15 years of experience
planning flight routes.
- You can also see Denver, the aircraft flying west.
(Patrick speaking indistinctly on background)
- [Narrator] So he's here to explain how that process works
and how an airlines route system affects travelers.
- There's two main network structures.
There's hub and spoke, and there's point to point.
- [Narrator] United and other legacy airlines,
like Delta and American, use this model.
- The way the hub and spoke works,
you have Denver as a hub and then you'll have flights
from, let's say, Lubbock, Albuquerque,
Jackson Hole, and Las Vegas.
These are the spokes;
the spokes cities all fly into the hub.
The passengers then change airplanes
and then those flights disperse
to different cities across the country.
- [Narrator] Here's what that looks like on a real-time map.
- In Los Angeles and San Francisco,
you can see traffic going out to Hawaii,
traffic intra California,
and then traffic coming up across the upper northeast.
(Patrick speaking indistinctly on background)
- [Narrator] Here's what that looks like
on an aircraft schedule.
- And the color depicts the hub.
Aircraft number six, for example, it's flying from Korea
and every time it's in red,
it's coming back to San Francisco's.
- [Narrator] The spokes are designed to feed travelers
into the hub around the same time
to make connections easier and more efficient.
But this also creates periods
of very high and very low volume in the hub.
- You look throughout the day,
and it'll go peak, trough, peak, trough, peak, trough,
and that drives cost
because you have a lot of activity and you have no activity.
- [Narrator] Hub and spoke is a more expensive model,
which is why legacy airlines
are the ones who typically use it.
Low-cost carriers, by definition, try to keep costs low.
- In order to support the hub,
you need a couple different things.
One, you need the assets, which is the gates,
the clubs, the lounges, the terminal space.
The second, you obviously need the employees.
- [Narrator] Another reason hub and spoke
is designed this way is to feed travelers
into larger aircraft for long-haul flights.
- We'll have aircraft like this 737 flying into our hub,
connecting to this large 350-seat aircraft
that's gonna fly to a place like Frankfurt or Johannesburg.
- [Narrator] Quayle says that by connecting in a hub,
travelers have more options when it comes to destinations,
flight times, and re-booking in case a flight gets canceled.
- Often, many hub-spoke carriers
have service to multiple hubs.
And so if there's a weather incident in a major hub,
we could fly you over a different hub.
And then once you get to that city,
you can be re-accommodated on the network out of that hub.
- [Narrator] If there's an issue with the aircraft,
hubs also typically have maintenance spaces.
- We can simply tow it to the hangar
and tow in a different aircraft up
to continue the flight on.
- [Narrator] To pay for all this infrastructure,
Quayle says legacy carriers charge a higher ticket price.
- Meaning a better product, better experience,
and hoping people will pay more for that product.
- [Narrator] Most low-cost airlines
like Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier
use a point-to-point system which works like this.
- You'd fly from San Antonio to Amarillo.
In Amarillo, that aircraft might turn and go to Kansas City.
And from Kansas City, it might go to St. Louis
and then down to Jacksonville.
- [Narrator] Southwest says
one benefit of this model is that
because planes don't have to connect through a major hub,
the airline can offer more nonstop flight options.
- If you live in a smaller community,
take San Antonio for example,
there's a low cost airline there
that has 20 different cities they serve out of San Antonio.
Whereas if you're flying a legacy carrier,
you're gonna need to connect
in a place like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta.
- [Narrator] Though point-to-point carriers
don't have official hubs, they do have larger locations
that facilitate many of their connections.
They usually have one fleet type
which simplifies their operation.
- They only have to have one crew and one maintenance team
providing service to the exact same aircraft.
The downside to this, though,
they're only able to serve mid-size and large cities,
and they can't fly trans-oceanic.
- [Narrator] Quayle says one of the challenges
with a point-to-point model
is the ripple effect if something goes wrong.
- If you're flying from San Antonio to Amarillo
and then from Amarillo to Kansas City,
if the airplane has a problem in Amarillo,
it's gonna then impact the passengers going to Kansas City
and those passengers getting on the plane in Kansas City
who wanna fly to St. Louis and then go beyond.
- [Narrator] Southwest says
if a flight is facing a lengthy delay
or is canceled between cities,
the airline will bring in another aircraft
or reroute travelers to minimize disruptions.
But some industry experts say the point-to-point model
may be one reason Southwest struggled to recover
from severe winter storms last December
leading it to cancel over 16,700 flights.
Southwest has held that the model wasn't to blame.
According to Southwest, a point-to-point model
brings in more redundancy during weather challenges
allowing the airline to get travelers home
as quickly as possible through other routings.
All airlines update their route networks
throughout the year.
These are the factors Quayle looks for
when deciding whether or not to add a new route.
- What's the nonstop demand?
So how many people are in the major city
going to the other city?
How much support is coming in
from all the different spokes into that hub
which provide feed to that new flight that we'd be adding?
- [Narrator] If no other airline flies to that destination,
that's another reason to add that route.
But Quayle says he also adds service
to places with a lot of competition.
(airplane whirs)
- In London Heathrow, for example,
we've increased service from New York to London Heathrow
to create more time channels throughout the day
for a consumer to go between New York and London.
- [Narrator] Partnerships with other airlines
also play a role in choosing where to fly.
- The reason we have as many flights as we have
into Frankfurt and Munich
is for their ability to connect onto Lufthansa
to go into Eastern Europe and North Africa.
- [Narrator] To add a route,
Quayle says airlines have to go
through a government regulatory process
which prevents other carriers
from piggybacking off their idea, and the process can take
anywhere from a couple months to a couple years.
- I hope people appreciate the complexity
and all the planning and work that goes in behind the scenes
so that when they show up at the airport,
they can get on a flight to go from point A to point B
and have it operate seamlessly.
(light music)
The funniest misconception people have about me
when they hear network planning
is they think that I work in IT.
(Patrick and camera crew chuckle)