[piskerpan]

No experience with the US market, but I thought that thanks to planes like A350 the opposite was happening: new routes between smaller cities thanks to fuel efficiency.

It's possible that in the US you're seeing that as a consequence of few available pilots and their resistance to change (hub and spoke has been around forever in the region)

[maxerickson]

The regional operator of the spoke flight from my local airport to the hub tried to change it to have a stopover at another airport, changing a ~1 hour flight to like 2.5 hours, with an hour sitting on the ground. The airport managed to reject the change.

I took that flight several times earlier in the year and it was always pretty close to capacity, so sort of hard to understand. I guess the most likely thing is that they were trying to eliminate the direct flight to the middle airport while maintaining service there, but screwing over the majority of your customers seems like a bad way to go about that.

400 mile drive, no trains.

[8ytecoder]

It seems like a post-pandemic thing. Until recently the hub and spoke model was pronounced dead thanks to high efficiency of long-haul flights.

[nivenkos]

The 1500 hour rule and its consequences...