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Aviation glossary

Hub-and-spoke

Also: hub-and-spoke network, hub-and-spoke model, spoke network

Airlines and business

Way of organising an airline network in which most flights start or end at a central airport, where passengers change to reach their destination.

What it is

Picture a bicycle wheel: the hub is the central airport and the spokes are the routes out to each city. With one hub and 50 destinations, an airline needs only 50 routes to link those cities with a single change, whereas connecting each pair directly would take 1,225 routes.

The model spread widely in the United States after deregulation in 1978. It lets airlines fill large aircraft by combining passengers with different origins and destinations, and keeps cities on the map that could never support direct flights. Copa Airlines, for example, links North, Central and South America through its hub in Panama City.

The drawbacks are that passengers must change planes, hubs become congested at peak times and a delay at the centre can ripple through much of the network.

On Vuelopedia

Copa Airlines

Related terms

HubAirport where an airline concentrates its flights and times its schedule so that passengers and cargo from many cities can connect with one another. Point-to-pointNetwork model in which an airline flies directly between the cities it serves, rather than funnelling connections through a central hub airport. Load factorShare of the capacity offered that is actually sold; for passengers, revenue passenger kilometres divided by available seat kilometres over a flight or period. Regional airlineAirline flying short, thinner routes with regional aircraft, often linking smaller cities to the hubs of the major carriers.
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This page was last updated on October 9, 2026

APA

Vuelopedia. (2026, October 9). Hub-and-spoke. Retrieved October 16, 2026, from https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke

MLA

“Hub-and-spoke.” Vuelopedia, Fundación Poderia, 9 Oct. 2026, vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke. Accessed 16 Oct. 2026.

Chicago

Vuelopedia. “Hub-and-spoke.” Fundación Poderia. Last modified October 9, 2026. https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke.

Harvard

Vuelopedia (2026) Hub-and-spoke. Available at: https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke (Accessed: 16 October 2026).

BibTeX

@misc{vuelopedia_en_glossary_hub_and_spoke,
  author       = {{Vuelopedia}},
  title        = {{Hub-and-spoke}},
  publisher    = {Fundación Poderia},
  year         = {2026},
  date         = {2026-10-09},
  url          = {https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke},
  howpublished = {\url{https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke}},
  urldate      = {2026-10-16},
  note         = {Accessed 2026-10-16}
}

Wikipedia

{{cite web |url=https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/hub-and-spoke |title=Hub-and-spoke |website=Vuelopedia |publisher=Fundación Poderia |date=2026-10-09 |access-date=2026-10-16 |language=en}}

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