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Legacy Airlines

  • Writer: kashifmalik3
    kashifmalik3
  • Sep 10, 2018
  • 2 min read

Traveling is my most public hobby that I continue to pursue no matter the obstacles ahead. It's pretty safe to say that I know my way around airports and how to bypass the common mistakes of novice travelers. However, most people never stop to think about the airline that is taking you to your final destination and how they operate. Well that changes now. I am going to explain what are the legacy airlines and how they operate their routes so you will be better prepared when booking flights.


Legacy Airlines is an airline that established it's interstate routes before the Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978. After some acquisitions and dissolving of airlines, the three that remain are Delta, American, and United. These 3 airlines alone make up half of the airline market within the United States. Still with me? Well it's about to get a whole lot more complicated.


These airlines operate on a spoke-hub distribution. One way to summarize this concept is to say that a flight must originate or terminate at a central "hub". A central "hub" is a place where an airline concentrates passenger travel and focuses on flight operations. Now of corse, there are exceptions where they don't follow this but this occurs during peak travel seasons or high passenger loads. I think the best way to demonstrate this is through an example.


Delta airlines currently has main central "hubs"in the USA at:

New York (JFK, LaGuardia)

Atlanta

Detorit

Minneapolis/St.Paul

Los Angeles

Seattle

Salt Lake City

Boston


A flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, for example, follows the spoke-hub distribution because the flight originates from a central "hub" (Atlanta). A flight from Phoenix to Los Angeles also follows this as the flight terminates at a central "hub" (Los Angeles). However, Delta does not fly from Pittsburgh to Iowa City directly because these two destinations are not a central "hub".


When looking at your next travel plans, it's good to see if you're traveling to a place that is a central "hub" because there will be more options of flights to choose from and it can even be cheaper than budget airlines if you book early enough.


I'm going to list the central "hubs" for American and United below:



American:

Dallas/Ft.Worth

Phoenix

Philadelphia

Los Angeles

New York (JFK, LaGuardia)

Chicago

Charlotte

Miami

Washington D.C (DCA)



United:

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Denver

Newark

Chicago

Washington D.C. (IAD)

Houston

Guam



 
 
 

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