Mayer and Sinai's study also identified the real culprit: the deliberate overscheduling of flights at peak periods by major airlines trying to increase the amount of connecting traffic at their hub airports. Major airlines like United, Delta, and American use a hub-and-spoke model as a way to offer consumers more flight choices and to save money by centralizing operations. Most of the traffic they send through a hub is on the way to somewhere else. (Low-cost carriers, on the other hand, typically carry passengers from one point to another without offering many connections.)
Via Jason Kottke [1], “Tragedy of the Airport: Why you get stuck for hours at O'Hare [2]”
Hoade and I flew Northwest Airlines [3] to Las Vegas, with a conection in Detroit—Detroit being a major (if not the major) hub for Northwestern, and the terminal is huge—so huge that it has light rail running from one end of the terminal to the other.
THOUGHT: Airlines will always fly you through a connection flight.
“notes taken during the trip”
I'm convinced that had I decided to fly Northwestern to Detroit, I would have a connecting flight through Atlanta. Airlines seem incapable of flying one directly to a destination.
[1] http://www.kottke.org/remainder/05/07/9032.html