Hub waves question?

Good day everyone, hope all is well.

I have a few questions in regards to how I have set up my hub waves and if I did it correctly. I am an avid fan of this game and have been playing on and off for the last few years, but have never tried and a hub and spoke model (I used to do point-point).

My airline is Wind Air in Croydon.

So I have set up 4-6 hour “waves” (I think I did that correctly), and I’m curious to know if a) I set up appropriately, b) do you create separate wave times for different segments of flights, such as domestic, North american, international?

Thank you for your help! Any assistance is greatly appreciated!! Happy flying!!

In my case, I try and include as flights as possible--of all types--in each wave (domestic, international, etc.) so that they can feed each other. Many of my smaller domestic routes (I am based in Madagascar, which can be difficult) rely on those connecting passengers for success.

It looks like you’ve got the idea down. YVR has a connection time of 75 minutes, and it looks like all of your arrivals land more than 75 minutes before another wave of departures.

Keep in mind, not all of your departures/arrivals have to coincide with a wave. Your hub airport also has a large amount of passenger demand, so you can operate a quick flight that only has passengers from Vancouver on it.

Won't slots fill up rather quickly if I continue to operate most of my departures on the four 6 hour wave times??

Wave 1 - 7:00 departure - land by 5:44,

Wave 2 - 13:00 departure- land by 11:44

Wave 3 - 9:00 departure - land by 17:44

Wave 4 - 1:00 departure - land by 23:44

This is what I have the waves set up as - to utilize the most slots available at YVR.

Thanks for your help guys, much appreciated!

I have used a wave system before but I just see it as useless waste of time atleast for the shorthaul and medium haul flights. I try to make the most of my planes and I make them fly nonstop from 5:00 to 00:00, or even more. I am not using a wave system as I would easy finish all the slots very fast and when I change aircraft types I have to totally remake every schedule instead of just the one I change to an other aircraft type. I have very few flights that are the same lenght and take the same time so it would be very bad to have them wait 1 hour and 30 minutes just for a wave. I have about 800 flights departing weekly in GOT and around 300 to 400 in ARN, BMA, NYO. And it would just be wasted time to have less departures when all flights feed into each other anyways.

My numbres may not be totally correct to the current statistics as most of the schedules are not activated yet because my entire fleet is going under a schedule change.

I operate an airline with roundabout 90 planes from Turin and a subsidary with 18 planes for long-range also from Turin. In Turin I have connection statistics of over 70%. Without Hub&Spoke I couldn't fill up a flight like Turin to Buenos Aires or to Tokyo. The disadvantage is of course, that there is scarcity of slots because Turin is only a 5-bar airport and therefore growth is limited. But without timed arrival and departure this kind of setup would be impossible I guess.

I recently also tried to time the arrivals with the departures on my hub in Wuhan (WUH). For the short-haul flights though I just add them back to back as CBE described. If you have enough frequency, then you don't need to have specific waves for shorter flights where you have already direct demand.

For destinations though where direct demand is limited, you definitely need the connecting pax. On my long-haul flights I have basically 100% connecting passengers, as the direct demand for passengers to fly to Wuhan is very very limited.

As I operate with two different long-haul types (787-9 and 747-8I) I had to create a connecting window of around 3 hours. That means, I try to have my long-haul fleet arrive starting from 20:00 (up to around 22:00), while my earliest long-haul departure is 21:50 up to 00:00. My min. transfer time is 1:00 only. Using this 4 hour window also avoids having any issues with the slots. You can easily time the short-haul flights to arrive somewhere in between. I also tried to time my maintenance windows (at least some of it) during that long-haul wave window, allowing for arrivals before and departures after the wave. This way, I can feed passengers from smaller airports to my hub, allowing them to fly out to the world, and late night I fly back to the smaller airports taking the arriving passenger from the long-haul flights out to my network.

Pax will happily transfer if the transfer time is less than 3:00h, if it's above that, you will loose them. Though I believe some even take longer connections, but not sure about this. Also keep in mind, that Pax will fly a detour of up to 2x the original, direct distance, using a connection. So for example you won't get connecting passengers MUC-FRA if your hub is in CDG, but you can bring all German Pax to Spain for example. Keep that in mind, if you have to schedule some flights and give up some connections. I for example made sure, that European flights can connect to my flights to Australia/New Zealand, while I didn't care for connections from Europe to North America. For this it makes sense to have the Hub ideally being somewhat in the center of your network, so you can get most out of the connections. If you have a hub in New York for example, it's much harder to get connecting passengers as they will fly a much longer route in most of the cases, if it doesn't even make it impossible. So Denver, Atlanta or Dallas would be a much better joice.

Constraints like already full airports, night-time restrictions, etc. will keep the whole excersise challenging. Using the new connecting pages already available on Quimby will really help to fine-tune your hub, as you can clearly see where you loose important connections and can possibly re-schedule a flight by half an hour to allow a connection for 10 more flights.

I normally also try to have fligths in the morning and evening to allow for business passengers travel to a destination the same day, though I believe in AS this has no effect. The Pax simply use any flight throughout the day and don’t care at what time it is, yet for me it satisfies my pride…