Abstract: This paper comprehensively analyses the airport congestion in hub-and-spoke network based on flight frequency, congestion cost and complementary airline alliances. We find that there is an overprovision of flight frequency and aircraft size is suboptimal, hence the aggravated problem of congestion. At the same time, we find that the flight frequency is positively related to airlines’ congestion cost and the disutility of schedule delay is negatively related to aircraft’s fixed cost. Complementary airline alliances lead to a higher profit; the price is lower for connecting passengers and higher for local passengers; complementary airline alliances can also internalize the congestion faced by partner airlines, optimize flight frequency and weaken congestion.

Key words: font-family: "Times New Roman", mso-ansi-language: EN-US, mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN, mso-bidi-language: AR-SA, mso-fareast-font-family: 楷体_GB2312">flight frequency, congestion cost, complementary airline alliances, hub-and-spoke