Originally Posted by WHBM
The US does not have a dominant hub like London or Tokyo are for their respective countries, the business is spread across multiple gateways. The fact that these are served by separate competitive carriers, all of whom wish to serve the main overseas points, also leads them to move to smaller aircraft and more of them.
That is an excellent point. The US carrier closest to an old-style hub dominator is probably CO, which is serving all those European destinations out of EWR and defends that market the way BA defends LHR... and even CO runs EWR, IAH and to a lesser extent CLE. When the 747 was conceived everybody flew to JFK and changed planes to cross the Atlantic. Now that idea is totally obsolete.