Long Haul Bases

As for mayor hubs you should not rule out MAD either. In particular strong on the South American routes.

Absolutely true, and I forgot to mention also that MXP is a bigger hub for Alitalia than FCO, although FCO also benefits from a large number of non-italian long haul carriers.

As for mayor hubs you should not rule out MAD either. In particular strong on the South American routes.

I suppose they would qualify as smaller hubs – my main interest is in the times – does anybody know when the bulk of long-haul flights take-off from the above hubs?

There are some fairly simple rules for hub departures for long haul routes. Asia is the most difficult so I will come back to this.

Typically from Europe, US flights depart from mid/late morning to mid/late afternoon, typically you should consider 11am-3pm GMT, so apply that across the hubs. These aircraft typically arrive around 2-3 hours later (local time obviously) and so can then depart from the US in the early to late evening, think typically 5pm – 10pm local time, to arrive back in Europe between very early (5-6am) and mid morning (11pm). There are a few exceptions to this, such as a United and BA flight from LHR to JFK that depart at about 8am and arrive back in late that night at about 10pm (from memory). Other exceptions include some flights to/from the West Coast which will depart late morning, but arrive back in mid/late afternoon.

The middle east is fairly evenly spread throughout the day for arrivals and departures.

So that leaves the Far East and Indian sub-continent. TYPICALLY many Asian flights arrive early-late afternoon and depart mid-late at night from Europe. HOWEVER there are a number of routes which have very early morning arrivals into Europe (perhaps 5-6am GMT) and then depart by lunchtime to early afternoon. In many cases an airline would often put on services leaving in the evening. BUT when they put a second service on they spread it to have a lunchtime sort of departure. These routes tend to be more spread than many US services.

I would say you have clearly identified the ‘major’ hubs in Europe, there are some others which are of interest. SWISS still hub a lot of traffic from other countries through ZRH. Another interesting hub is Helsinki (Finnair), which offers the shortest flying times to Asia. Don’t forget also that for many Asian/Australasian destinations passengers are using regional airports with connections in the middle east.

You don’t have to search the electronic timetables for the airlines, you can often download the actual timetables in pdf format…follow this…

http://www.britishairways.com/travel/mobilett/public/en_gb and choose the pc option,

http://www.klm.com/travel/travel_en/travel_information/travel_planning/timetable/index.htm

For Air France, go to their UK website, then click on timetable then at the bottom select the Download schedules option.

I think Lufthansa have a similar downloadable timetable, but haven’t checked. Hope this helps a bit.

Why not have a look at the timetables of the airlines you have mentioned? Don’t have to search every destination, just I suppose for the US you might search New York, Los Angeles, and for the East, Singapore and Dubai?

I suppose they would qualify as smaller hubs – my main interest is in the times – does anybody know when the bulk of long-haul flights take-off from the above hubs?

Would Madrid and Rome Fluminico qualify as hubs?