
The World’s Highest-Earning Airline Route - wallflower
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericrosen/2018/07/06/worlds-most-profitable-flights-this-airline-route-makes-1-billion-annually/
======
caminante
The article is critically flawed.

This author is merely regurgitating another blog post [0], and wrongly,
conflating profits with revenues. The original post didn't make the same
representations.

[0] [https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-
route](https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route)

~~~
disillusioned
In fairness, only the headline uses "profit", and was conceivably changed by
an editor. The Forbes article refers to it appropriately as revenue
throughout.

~~~
ksec
Does makes $1 billion implies it has a profits or $1B, or could it also mean
$1 billion revenue.

I had a little thoughts about this the when commenting on Reddit revenue post,
someone said make $1 billion means $1 billion profits. But I often sees
Financial Newspaper refer Making x amount of money being revenue.

~~~
caminante
Make (without context) is ambiguous because you don't know what's made.

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dghughes
In my tiny little part of the world it would take me 3 1/2 hours to drive
328km to Halifax.

Or pay anywhere from $500 to $900 to fly the 180km as-the-crow-flies distance
for a few minutes in the air.

One flight flies 1,300km the wrong way then back, two connections, a a layover
and then to Halifax for $1,100.

~~~
sokoloff
Ever considered learning to fly and flying it?

Have any friends with airplanes that can drop you off?

~~~
cm2012
Flying private airplanes is probably the most dangerous common thing you can
do.

~~~
namibj
Are there any small enough for the one-parachute-for-plane-and-contents
technology that can go closer to the speed of sound (like, go about Mach .8 or
so), and rely on pulling into stall to slow down enough for the parachute to
deploy without ripping out it's part of the airframe? That should be much
safer than the current way when operating small aircraft at speeds where that
parachute could not deploy directly.

~~~
dlgeek
So, they're not nearly as fast as you're describing, but Cirrus does have
parachutes on a lot of it's planes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_System)

~~~
namibj
I know, the issue there is that if you deploy a parachute at over about Mach
0.4~0.5, you will either rip the airframe apart or reduce survival chances of
large vertebrae due to the massive acceleration. The solution there would be
going into _a_ stall, as that usually serves to provide the drag needed to
slow down to safe parachute speeds, but not so much that the airframe can't be
reasonably build strong enough to not suffer damage that matters if one
considers the plane scrap metal once it lands with the parachute.

This is just too slow to get the main benefit of air travel, which is being
able to go at barely subsonic speeds without handling being a massive
headache. Of course you will have worse handling at barely subsonic speeds,
due to any large deflection going transsonic and having the potential to
result in loss of control. But that can easily be handled electronically,
especially if the plane is at least somewhat aerodynamically stable, i.e.
won't require constant corrections to not go into stall (like some modern
fighter jets do).

~~~
sokoloff
If you only have to go a couple hundred miles, the cruise speed isn't a
significant factor to the overall trip time. Let the airlines handle the 1000+
mile trips (with all the associated hassles); slower airplanes don't give up
near as much time on short legs.

Door to door, I can beat the airlines on most trips under 1000 miles. I don't
need to get to the airport 90 minutes ahead of departure, go through security,
wait for boarding to complete, wait for pushback, connect through a hub, wait
for bags, and can often land at an airport closer to where I want to be and
have a rental car or cab waiting. The fact that cruise speed is only 215
mph/350 kph is made up for by all the slippage inherent in airline travel.

~~~
namibj
Yes, the one thing missing that would be being able to start from a normal
road, and land on something similar, which could allow pretty much door-to-
door is too hard to make work for how many could afford it.

~~~
sokoloff
In Alaska, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Dakota, it's legal to land
on rural roads.

Even in places where you can't land on roads, there are _WAY_ more airports
than you probably think in the US. It's about 19K, with a little over 5K of
those being public use. (Even the private ones are often accessible with just
a coordinating phone call.)

Of those, fewer than 400 are "Primary" airports (defined as having scheduled
commercial service and more than 10K enplanements [commercial passengers
outbound] per year).

~~~
namibj
Yes, I know there are many airports. This is about starting from "The next
road with sufficiently little traffic that has suitable clearance and
curvature to start from", and maybe something like folding wings inwards or so
to get it small enough for maneuvering it as a large car.

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mota7
Looks like this is a re-hash of the data from
[https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-
route](https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route)

------
Havoc
Bit stupid crunching it by revenue. Obviously the long routes generate the
most rev, but they also have the highest fuel costs.

~~~
sjtrny
Sydney to Melbourne is #2 and is barely a 1 hour flight.

~~~
Havoc
Even a bad analysis can yield interesting datapoints

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thewizardofaus
It really surprises me that the Australian domestic flight with Qantas is so
high on the list.

~~~
jcranmer
Judging from the chart at the end, it looks like monopolistic price gouging
explains it. It's the third-highest revenue per hour of the entire list, but
the total hours travelled is fairly low compared to others on the list.
Compare the three North American transcontinental flights: half the revenue
per hour margins, but far more hours traveled, or simultaneously the lowest-
margin and most-travelled routes on the list.

~~~
jen729w
The morning and evening business traffic drives the majority of the profits.
You can get to Sydney for ~$100 at the right time of day but I've done MEL-CBR
a lot – same direction, not as far – and it's $800 if you want to go at 6:30am
and come back at 5pm.

The departures board at the Qantas terminal at 6am is funny. There's a flight
to Sydney – a fully loaded 737-800 – every 15 minutes. Over in Jetstar it's
the same, Virgin the same.

~~~
gsnedders
Not quite Japan levels, where from Haneda to various other cities you can have
flights that frequent, but all 777s/787s.

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abhinai
This article talks about "routes" but only shows revenue by individual
airlines. For example LAX <=> JFK has tons of different airlines flying
between them while Qantas has near monopoly on SYD <=> MEL route (for corp
travel, which is a big chunk).

I'd much rather see overall revenues between destinations summed across all
flights operating between them.

~~~
asfasgasg
BA tops the list at 1B revenue NYC to Heathrow. Virgin runs 80% as many
flights on this same route, so they should be making in the ballpark of 800M
revenue on that route. This is more than a number of other entrants on the
list.

So I can only assume that the metric on display is something other than what
the title and blog post communicate. It is something like,

    
    
        - Select all airline-routes pairs.
        - Group by endpoints and airline.
        - Order by SUM(revenue) DESC.
        - Drop duplicate routes.
    

That is, for any given route, they report the revenue of the highest revenue
airline on that route. They select the top ten routes by the single airline
making the most revenue on that route. This is an utterly zany metric and I
can't imagine what use there is knowing it, but there you have it.

------
forkLding
Not surprised about the Vancouver to Toronto flights, its cheaper for me to
fly from San Fran to Toronto and back versus flying from Vancouver to Toronto
and back as indicated by my corporate flight expenses on Air Canada which
usually have some kind of discount applied. This gets worse in the surge
seasons when everyone is on holidays.

~~~
pkaler
This is unfortunately because Toronto is Air Canada's hub and Calgary is
WestJet's hub.

You can get directly to a few places from YVR. But eventually you have to fly
through Calgary, Toronto, SFO, SEA, LAX, ORD, JFK, etc to get to many cities.

[http://www.yvr.ca/-/media/yvr/documents/air-
services/destina...](http://www.yvr.ca/-/media/yvr/documents/air-
services/destinations-brochure_2017_03.pdf?la=en)

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cyberferret
I am flabbergasted that Qantas has the #2 slot for Melbourne-Sydney! No wonder
players like Compass and OzJet tried to shoulder into that market (with little
success) 10 or 20 years ago. I know of a couple of friends who live in one
city and literally commute to the other every day/week for work, but I didn't
realise how many people must to it daily to make this such a cash cow route.

~~~
cylinder
Its the second busiest route in the world. It's a very easy flight, compared
with driving and train, and is heavy with business travellers, hence the
revenue.

It could still use more services, the flights should be cheaper than they
currently are.

~~~
Reason077
It’s not the second _busiest_ by passenger numbers. All of the world’s busiest
routes are in Asia.

It’s the second “highest earning” in terms of fare revenue, however.

~~~
cylinder
It is number two in the world by total number of flights per year:
[http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-busiest-airline-flight-
ro...](http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-busiest-airline-flight-routes-
melbournesydney-now-worlds-second-busiest-h0e7ha)

It's somewhere around #5 by total number of passengers.

~~~
Reason077
Indeed. That’s because Qantas and their competitors use a large number of
small aircraft on the route, maintaining a high frequency.

If you look at the real busiest routes (by passenger count), like Singapore to
KL, they tend to use larger wide body aircraft which carry a lot more
passengers per flight.

------
woodpanel
The article has some intriguing detail: contrary to my bias, it seems to be
that the routes with the most earnings are highly contested (and not the
fringe ones with an immediate monopoly).

But I wonder: has this more to do with a) existing demand and b) high
optimization capacity (since the routes have dozens of flights/day and include
at least one of the airline‘s hubs.

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Robotbeat
Sounds like a good short-list of places where you might first build supersonic
or hypersonic transport hubs:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-
ultsWt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0)

[https://boomsupersonic.com/](https://boomsupersonic.com/)

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kolmogorov
SFO - FRA has to be incredibly profitable . Only Lufthansa and Unites fly it
(codeshare partners ). Regular economy for the rest of the year is around 2300
USD round trip and closer to the flight it’s around 3500. It’s completely
ridiculous compared to other more competitive routes like London.

~~~
raverbashing
Is that price without any connections? Because I suspect that flight gets most
of its passengers from connections.

~~~
kolmogorov
nor sure I understand the question. it's for a economy return flight (direct).
funnily enough you can sometimes get a Lufthansa flight to Copenhagen for
around 1000 and that connects through frankfurt. that's because copenhagen is
more competitive from SFO. with carry-on that's a way to game the pricing but
I heard they cancel the return if you don't check in in CPH.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, that's what I meant (and you exemplified), they charge more for SFO-FRA
than for a flight that has one of its legs as SFO-FRA

And I suspect most of the passengers on SFO-FRA are from European connections
and don't have FRA as their final destination (or initial origin)

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rospaya
No China locations, which is interesting. Are high speed trains dominating
their domestic market?

~~~
rahimnathwani
There are 10-15 high speed trains between each way per day Beijing and
Shanghai (4.5 to 5.5 hour journey time).

Planes are nominally faster (2.5 hours), start earlier (6:30am) and end later
(last departure is ~10:30pm, whereas last fast train is ~7pm). There are
several airlines serving that route, meaning planes leave roughly every half
an hour, and tickets can be had for as little as $110 one way (more at more
sane hours or if you buy closer to the date of travel).

There are ~10,000 flights in each direction each year.

~~~
paulcole
Nominally means “in name only”. Did you intend to use a word with a different
meaning?

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/nominally](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/nominally)

~~~
gruez
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominal#Adjective](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominal#Adjective)

>Insignificantly small; trifling.

~~~
paulcole
Do you think that accurately describes the difference between 2.5 hours and
4.5-5.5 hours?

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hbosch
A flight time of 2.5 hrs is realistically 4.5 hours when you add in security,
boarding, deboarding, getting a taxi on the other end...

~~~
rahimnathwani
Yup, except:

\- (in plane's favour) taxi lines at train stations in Beijing are much longer
than those at the airport

\- (in train's favour) domestic flights in China are often delayed by 30+ mins

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nashashmi
[http://www.anna.aero/2016/08/31/london-to-new-york-market-
an...](http://www.anna.aero/2016/08/31/london-to-new-york-market-analysed/)

Number of passengers between London and New York

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fyfy18
One of the interesting data points not mentioned is these routes usually use
larger aircraft like B747 (BA) and A380 (QF, EK). So the main reason why they
are so profitable is primarily down to passenger numbers more than anything
else.

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Jaruzel
What would be more interesting to the layperson is the actual profit the
airline makes per flight for each of the top routes.

Is there any data on this anywhere?

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myrandomcomment
I would love to know SFO > Tokyo as I make the flight 1-2 times a month (Tokyo
being a hub in some cases to the rest of Asia).

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throw727272
I wonder if it makes sense to compare this to the Shinkansen route from Tokyo
to Osaka.

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sjg007
I want to know how BA gets away with their ridiculous fuel surcharges.

~~~
nradov
They get away with whatever customers are willing to pay for.

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allcentury
What's the SF -> Newark connection I'm missing?

~~~
mlinksva
United hubs.

