No experience with the US market, but I thought that thanks to planes like A350 the opposite was happening: new routes between smaller cities thanks to fuel efficiency.

It's possible that in the US you're seeing that as a consequence of few available pilots and their resistance to change (hub and spoke has been around forever in the region)

The 1500 hour rule and its consequences...

The regional operator of the spoke flight from my local airport to the hub tried to change it to have a stopover at another airport, changing a ~1 hour flight to like 2.5 hours, with an hour sitting on the ground. The airport managed to reject the change.

I took that flight several times earlier in the year and it was always pretty close to capacity, so sort of hard to understand. I guess the most likely thing is that they were trying to eliminate the direct flight to the middle airport while maintaining service there, but screwing over the majority of your customers seems like a bad way to go about that.

400 mile drive, no trains.

It seems like a post-pandemic thing. Until recently the hub and spoke model was pronounced dead thanks to high efficiency of long-haul flights.

I wish I knew. Nothing worse than a red-eye from CA to DC with a forced multi hour layover in Atlanta or Charlotte at 4am (before many dining options are open).

That is not my experience at all. I fly non-stop between major US cities all the time. For smaller cities I may need to make a single connection.

I live on the east coast and within 45 minutes of 2 major airports. I just did some quick checking. Following are examples of the number of daily non-stops available from them:

San Francisco - 11 Las Angeles - 13 Dallas - 17 Seattle - 9 Portland - 4 Chicago - 33 St Louis - 9 Denver - 14

I fly to Little Rock, AR a couple of times a year. There are no non-stop flights but a quick search showed over 40 1-stop options from just the airport closest to me. Not all of those are going to be combinations most people want to do or are cost effective but if you throw away 1/2 if them that is still over 20 options. I also fly into Albuquerque, NM a couple of times a year. From my closest airport there are 58 1-stop options. If I drive 75 minutes to a further airport there are 4 non-stop flights to Albuquerque per week.

If you live in or near a smaller city served only by regional flights and are flying to another smaller city served only by regional flights than 2 stops will be necessary but 4 seems excessive.

Anecdotally, the reverse is not true. West to East non-stop flights have been scarce as of late to many major cities, even from a major hub, compared to a few years ago. Some flights in the same direction have sometimes been faster via Canada than staying the US.

I too am curious as to the shift.

Having had to do that quite frequently in the US, flights from West to East in my experience are much more likely to be non-stop hub to hub, or entirely unavailable.

The time difference and regional/hopper flights catering to "commuters" who need to fly early morning and late evening doesn't play well with the time zone changes, so you can either have a bunch of hopper flights with full day layovers at each airport, or you can catch an early morning long haul flight from a major hub airport to another major hub airport.

In fact I think I just saw an article (can't find the source) that talked about post pandemic the US domestic flights were much more focused on large volume hub-to-hub flights as a way of serving pre-pandemic customer levels despite understaffing.

An even quicker check showed 7 daily non-stop from San Francisco to my area and 4 non-stop from Portland. All of the Portland flights were red eye flights. I stopped counting but there were at least 30 1 stop flights from Portland with a layoff around an hour.

Well your experience contradicts both mine and my family's, the both of us living in two of the most major cities in the U.S. And there has absolutely been a dropoff of nonstop flights. Several used to exist and now literally none between areas I used to fly.

Flying is more expensive than it used to be, demand has dropped. At least for me, the additional COVID security theater, as well as frustratingly high rental car prices has made it a no brainer. I'll just drive. At least the covid theater is going away, it seems. Airlines are losing money if a plane is empty. Until demand for those nonstop routes pick up, those routes will not be revived.

Same sentiment. Airports are a pain to get to, security is a pain, taking time to account for the variable length of the security line is a pain, checking your baggage is a pain, dealing with the race for the overhead bin space is a pain, the inevitable delays that will ruin your whole itinerary are a pain, the lack of legroom is a pain... For destinations on the east coast (where Amtrak is actually reliable) I've begun taking trains to the exclusion of flying. Slower, but more comfortable, and I can get work done or just relax without being crammed into a sardine can.

20 years ago, there were many more airlines in the US [1]. Many of these airlines, while 'national,' were mostly regional, and serviced particular routes. As the airlines have merged, not only have costs gone up, but routes have gone down because the big players aren't competing with each other. In fact, they were found guilty of price collusion with the whole 'capacity discipline' scandal.

Another thing to consider is the airports themselves. It's impossible for new carriers to introduce new routes in many instances because the airports cannot accommodate any more planes. Air traffic has gone from around 2B travelers per year in 2004 to 4.7B in 2019 [2]. I'm willing to bet terminals, gates, and runways have not gone up 250% in the same time period (it's likely air traffic has increased more in developing nations relative to the US, but I'm sure the US still accounts for a fair amount of this growth).

Personally speaking, I have never had more than 1 connection each way to anywhere in the US. I only fly major carriers and live near a decent sized international airport. I also travel any day or time, depending on which flights I like best, not necessarily the cheapest flights. It might be a worse experience if you're always shopping for the cheapest flight.

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/airline-mergers-and-acquisit... 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...