The Geography of Deregulation in the European Aviation Market

The deregulation of US aviation since 1978 has resulted in the reconfiguration of airlines’ route networks, and in the concentration of traffic on a small number of central airports or ‘hubs’. This paper investigates whether a similar trend can be observed in the European aviation network after deregulation. Data is used for all airports in the European Union receiving scheduled services for the period 1990–98, and both intra‐European and intercontinental services are considered. The findings on the airport level suggest that intercontinental traffic is increasingly concentrated on Europe’s primary hubs, and that intra‐European traffic is increasingly concentrated on smaller airports in the European aviation network. On the route level, the results support the claim that the structure of the European aviation network has moved in the direction of a hub‐and‐spoke network over the sample period with the secondary hubs playing a more important role in the hub‐spoke traffic.