Originally Posted by
Walnut
Airlines and manufacturers are moving towards point to point operations, thus to concentrate on a hub is going against the market. Look how successful the B787 has become 0 to 900 already. Why should people travel from the North to connect, much better to fly from a nearby airport?
That hasn't happened at all for long distance routes, and it was sheer marketing guff by Boeing's 787 sales team some years ago to claim so. In fact carriers still are consolidating to routes from their hub only.
The Boeing 787 has been used by and large to replace existing aircraft, either end-of-life 767s or, in a notable number of instances, 777s that were proving too large for the route. And they pretty much all operate spokes out of their owner's hub.
What has happened is that the number of hub operators has increased at the various spoke points, the most evident being the ME3 which have developed large hub-based networks from their own closely-adjacent bases, and thus diluted the market to an extent, thus from "the North" you can fly to any of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, and thence onward to India, far East, Australia etc. But they are all very much hub-based operations, it has just diluted previous hubs like Amsterdam for such journeys.
Heathrow's lack of runway capacity is what makes it more difficult for them to challenge with a true hub operation of their own, and indeed this increasing hubbing trend makes expansion away from Heathrow, at Gatwick etc, laughable.