Feeder Route

A feeder route is a short flight that carries passengers from a smaller regional airport to a major hub airport, where those passengers connect to longer onward flights. The feeder route's primary purpose is to aggregate demand and deliver it to the hub network rather than to serve a high-demand city-pair market in its own right.

What Is a Feeder Route?

Feeder routes are the capillaries of the hub-and-spoke network — the smallest vessels through which passengers flow into the larger arteries of trunk routes. A feeder from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Dallas-Fort Worth, operated by a 50-seat regional jet on behalf of American Airlines, is not primarily designed for passengers traveling to Dallas; it is designed to capture travelers heading beyond Dallas to New York, London, or Tokyo.

How It Works in Practice

Airlines typically contract feeder routes to regional carriers operating under capacity purchase agreements, meaning the mainline carrier pays the regional operator a fixed rate per block hour regardless of how many passengers are on board. This insulates the regional from revenue risk while ensuring the mainline carrier controls scheduling and branding. The regional aircraft arrives at the hub timed precisely to a departure bank, and the connecting passengers have a guaranteed minimum connecting time before their next flight departs. Changi Airport in Singapore is fed by dozens of regional carriers from Southeast Asian secondary cities, delivering passengers into Singapore Airlines' long-haul network.

Why It Matters

Feeder routes extend the geographic reach of a hub airline's network far beyond what direct service economics would allow. A hub airline with 10 feeder routes arriving before each departure bank can offer connectivity to hundreds of city pairs without operating a single direct flight on most of them. For the communities served, a feeder route may represent their only scheduled commercial air service and their gateway to the global network.

Key Facts and Figures

• A typical feeder route operates 2 to 6 daily round trips to align with multiple hub banks
• Feeder aircraft include 19- to 90-seat turboprops and regional jets, depending on market size
• In the US, regional carriers operating feeder routes account for roughly 45 percent of all scheduled departures
• Essential Air Service (EAS) subsidizes feeder routes in small US communities where commercial viability is marginal

Related Concepts

Hub Airport, Spoke Airport, Regional Jet, Hub-and-Spoke Model, Essential Air Service