"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 11:59:50 on
Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Recliner remarked:
It's an interesting table. If you look at all the merged airlines, I
suspect the rankings would change.

Lufthansa+Swiss+Austrian+Brussels+Eurowings (etc) would almost
certainly beat Emirates, and AF+KLM might well be bigger still. I
wonder what Iberia and bmi were?

Both presumably below 73k, or they'd be in the table. BMI's routes were
mainly Europe and Middle East, which are short on miles, and they tended
to use smaller planes (and codeshare with partners reduces BMI's metal's
mileage too).

I'm also surprised how
low Singapore Airlines comes. It pioneered the city state hub business
model that Emirates now uses, but has been comprehensively overtaken.

I thought that was Cathay Pacific (city hub in Hong Kong), bicbw.
--
Roland Perry

I think it depends on your definition of a hub. CX have been around longer
than SQ and have always operated out of HKG. However, the extent to which
they ran their network so that people could fly to HKG and out again to
their destination even when they started operating Electras and later 880s
is perhaps questionable. There's no doubt it happened but for many years I
suspect it was a happy coincidence rather than a planned operation.
Remember that on many routes they probably only operated once a day and that
they were restricted to operating within East Asia for many years so that
BOAC was protected against competition.

What SQ became known for was bringing flights in from Europe to SIN,
shuffling the passengers and sending them on to Australasia. My memory
suggests they were doing that before CX was able to break out of its' East
Asian home and start operating intercontinentally.