[bubbabojangles]

The hub and spoke system also contributes to the congestion we see at the airports. A distributed system would be more tolerant to issues like weather, and you can afford to pad flight schedules with little impact on congestion due to the fewer throughput of planes at any one airport. This of course may not make financial sense for the Airline to distribute their operations, would need to be regulated.

[lostapathy]

We're already starting to see that change. As traffic has grown airlines have added more point-to-point flights that skip the hubs. Newer aircraft have also changed the economics of those route changes well and enabled more point-to-point flights that weren't previously economical.