Can US airports ever be international hubs?

With a career of over 35 years spent looking at aviation data and providing insights based on evidence, there is a time when experience also permits me to draw on personal travel episodes to comment on the aviation industry. So, my 20-something daughter bought a cheap ticket from London to Costa Rica via a major US airport, with flights operated by one of the big US carriers. The ticket was sold with a transfer time of 2 hours. Those familiar with arriving at US airports from overseas would know this might be challenging and, perhaps inevitably, my daughter missed her connection and had to overnight in the city before travelling onwards the next day.

The USA is somewhat unique in having no transit product or transit facilities at airports and so passengers connecting between international flights need to clear security, collect checked baggage, recheck the baggage for the next flight and go through security again before boarding their connecting flight. In my daughters’ case, the first security process took an hour, helpfully communicated by the airport itself which makes wait times public, but the checked bags didn’t appear until 90 minutes after the flight landed. By the time she collected her bag and rushed to the transfer desk she was told it was too late to get the bags sent to on the onward flight. There were around 21 passengers trying to make the same connection, all to be accommodated in hotels overnight at the expense of the airline.

So, this begs two questions. Can US airports ever truly act as international hub airports? And what purpose does a Minimum Connect Time (MCT) of 60 minutes serve if the airport and airline simply are not set up to deliver to these standards?

It makes me realise that in our measuring of megahubs in terms or size or number of destinations served, or on-time performance by the average minutes that flights are late, or the number of cancelled flights on a given day,  we have no measure for how many passengers missed their connection or whether MCT’s are fit for purpose.

-Becca Rowland