Frequency is more than just an underrated 2000 movie about time travel and parenthood starring James Caviezel and Dennis Quaid. It is a core function of how airlines build their networks.

Clearly epic segues aside, an airline’s approach to frequency says a lot about its business model.

Take American Airlines, for instance. American offers the highest number of flights per route in the U.S. domestic network. This makes sense, considering American is a network carrier where connectivity to the hub matters, and options for departure time matter just as much.

For the 12 months from April 2024 to March 2025, American Airlines averaged 2.8 flights per day on each route it offered within the U.S. Considering most of these flights were either to or from a hub, the number of options presented to a passenger considering travel expands exponentially.

Beyond connectivity and schedule options, frequency also offers reliability. Flights canceled due to weather or other issues still offer recovery options through other daily flights. Additionally, flights and connections through other hubs work to increase options during irregular operations.

Now consider the opposite end of the spectrum. Ignoring Sun Country for the moment, we’ll look at Avelo, Breeze, and Allegiant. The three airlines with the lowest average daily frequency. If American has highlighted the benefits of high frequency, why are these airlines operating such a low average daily frequency?

Costs.

Actually, that’s only half the story. The real answer is profits.

Pioneered by Allegiant, the idea of aligning capacity to only the places and times the most people want to fly makes sense. Now consider that almost everybody wants to fly Friday and Sunday, and you have the challenge of building a fleet in which every aircraft flies two days a week, and some days don’t have flights at all.

And it works.

Which brings us back to Sun Country. Bottoming out the chart, Sun Country clearly knew we were going to write about frequency and designed its network to break the charts.

In reality, Sun Country offers low-frequency flying, almost exclusively touching Minneapolis, MN. But the airline also schedules a near-insane number of individual flights.

Sun Country has perfected the charter business. In fact, you can often follow sports schedules by watching Sun Country’s weekly oddball flights (a dynamic of which subscribers to Cranky Network Weekly are keenly aware). The airline operates a scheduled flight to position the aircraft for the charter flight. And why not? Might as well sell seats on the flights that would otherwise be empty.

But Sun Country, Avelo, and Breeze all have one important thing in common: Allegiant.

Whether through CEOs Jude Bricker at Sun Country and Andrew Levy at Avelo, the CCO Lukas Johnson or former President Tom Doxey at Breeze, all took successful paths through Allegiant.

Mean vs Median

You came for the charts, now stay for a statistics lesson.

You’ll notice our chart includes two bars: one for the average (mean) daily flights and the other for the median. The two don’t diverge often…

…except for Hawaiian.

Hawaiian Airlines operates an average of 2.7 flights per day; however, very few of its departures are between two and three flights per day. Yet the median number of frequencies per day is 1.

Why?

Hawaiian operates a very disconnected network - appropriate for the disconnected nature of the islands from which it operates. As such, there are a few routes with an incredible number of flights per day — over 20 (Take notes. This will literally be on the test).

Short-haul inter-island flights occur frequently. However, flights to the mainland do not. In fact, the majority of flights to the U.S. mainland only occur once a day.

Compare American Airlines, where the distribution of flights and markets is more standard. Sure, American operates 13 flights per day in some markets, but very few. The mainstay of American’s network clusters around 2.4 flights per day — the median.

Pop quiz

Now that we’ve covered frequency ad-nauseum, how well do you know the individual markets? These are the top 15 most frequently flown markets in the domestic U.S. based on their average number of flights per day.

Which are the routes, and which airline operates each?

Give up? You can find the answer here.

Discussion with David Chaimovitz - CEO, Setna iO

The edge in aviation today is green time. That takes a different way of thinking - one like David Chaimovitz from Setna iO has.

Our latest Time on Wing podcast dives deep with David on the genesis of Setna iO and how the company is finding value for operators in today's new supply chain realities.

We cover quite a bit in this episode, including potential future directions of the market and the challenges of managing an aviation business through COVID.

You can listen to the discussion here: https://www.timeonwingpodcast.com/2127612/episodes/16470659-david-chaimovitz-ceo-setna-io

Or even better, watch it here:

https://youtu.be/9Ixbi2zZOw4

You should do a chart on…

We like to create valuable charts. But, it’s not easy coming up with new ideas amid the endless hours delivering data-driven edge to our customers. In our quest to provide a valuable weekly newsletter we can keep guessing what you find most valuable, or you could just tell us.

If you have an idea for data visualization, reply to this email and let us know what analysis you’d find most valuable. We’d love to hear from you and will happily name-drop.

If you were forwarded this email, score!

As valuable as it is, don't worry; it's entirely free. If you would like to receive analyses like this regularly, subscribe below.

Then...

You can pay it forward by sending it to your colleagues. They gain valuable insights, and you get credit for finding new ideas!

Win-win!

Subscribe here