Of course Heathrow is a hub for BA. I doubt you would say the same for Gatwick.
BA/LHR never developed the same ‘wave’ system as some Continental hubs, partly because it was already too congested to permit the necessary rescheduling.
It also (probably) has a smaller proportion of feeder services from secondary cities, again because of the congestion and the high opportunity cost of using slots for such services – which either have to make a significant contribution to the network flows, or get shuffled off to LGW.
There are differences arising from its location at the edge of Europe. It is very well placed to pick up transatlantic transfer traffic, much less so on routes heading East.
The most exquisite example of a hub that I ever came across was by Piedmont, somewhere in the Midwest – I think it may have been Columbus OH. The structure was as follows:
Every morning around 8:15, eight 737s would fly in from various smaller cities to the North of the hub – places like Green Bay and Grand Banks. They would arrive within a 10-minute window. 20 minutes later they would all depart, for much bigger cities to the South and East. A little after midday they would all stage back through in the other direction. Then the cycle would be repeated with a mid afternoon southbound wave and a late-ish evening northbound wave.
Piedmont had no other services at this airport. So with eight aircraft they generated 32 daily departures, to sixteen destinations, in a network of 80 city-pairs. And for 22h30 out of 24h, there was no Piedmont aircraft on the apron of Columbus (if indeed that’s where it was).
Hubs come in all shapes and sizes, but I still think of that as a benchmark against which to compare them.
Last edited by The SSK; 15th Feb 2012 at 13:21.