
Resilience and rewiring of the passenger airline networks in the United States - luu
https://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0774
======
tyingq
That's a lot of work to come to the conclusion that a mostly point-to-point
network is more resilient to attack/failure than a hub-and-spoke network.
Seems obvious that losing a hub creates a mess. Am I missing some nuance here?

~~~
cwmma
I think the big thing is that hub and spoke was always considered more
efficient but here they are saying that if you take into account resilience
into the equation then p2p may be more efficient than a hub and spoke model.

~~~
rchowe
I think point-to-point is supposed to be the most efficient provided you
accurately match airplanes to the routes people want to fly.

Hub flying is useful for folks that want to go from one small city to another;
on a given day there might be two people who want to fly from Providence, RI
to San Antonio, TX so it's not viable to fly a plane between them, but if you
route them via Philadelphia, PVD-PHL-SAT, you can accommodate them with
limited extra distance or extra time and also accommodate people wanting to
travel PVD-PHL and PVD-PHL-SYR, etc.

Once you start working in units of "planeloads" instead of "people", point-to-
point flying is likely going to be more efficient in terms of time, distance,
cost, etc...

