Understanding hub waves: how to use banking at Frankfurt and Munich

You’re standing at the fence, barely anything lands for half an hour – and suddenly six or seven lights are lined up on approach. An hour later, one Lufthansa jet after another takes off, and then it’s quiet again. That’s no coincidence, it’s by design. At hubs like Frankfurt and Munich, the hub airline works with hub waves, known in industry jargon as banking. If you understand this pattern, you can plan your spotting day far more relaxed: you know when you need to be at the spot, when you can switch positions in peace and when the chances of rarities go up.

Hub waves: the short answer

A hub wave is a bundled block of arrivals and departures of a network airline at its hub. First, many feeders land in quick succession, then the passengers connect, and then the onward flights depart, also closely spaced. A calmer valley follows before the next wave begins. For you at the fence, that means: traffic comes in surges, not evenly. If you know the surges, you’re at the right spot at the right time.

The principle belongs to the hub-and-spoke model: instead of connecting every city directly with every other city, an airline collects its passengers at one node and distributes them onward from there. For this to work, feeders and onward flights have to match up in time – and that’s exactly where the waves come from.

Why airlines fly in waves at all

Picture a flight from Bremen to Frankfurt. If it lands at a time when only two long-haul flights depart in the next hour, it offers its passengers exactly two useful connections. If it lands shortly before a block of thirty departures, on the other hand, thirty connections arise at once. Multiply that by all the feeders in a wave, and the number of possible connections grows enormously, without a single additional flight being needed.

Lufthansa showed how important connecting passengers are for the German hubs in a 2018 position paper, using one example: on a flight from Frankfurt to Chicago with 331 passengers, only 89 boarded in Frankfurt, while the other 242 arrived on feeders from 61 different cities. One reason given is Germany’s decentralized structure: around Frankfurt or Munich, far fewer people live within reach of the airport than around London or Paris, for instance. Without connecting passengers, many long-haul routes simply couldn’t be filled.

Aviation research describes this bundling as a wave-system structure. The transport researchers Guillaume Burghouwt and Jaap de Wit studied the wave patterns of European hubs in the early 2000s. Their finding: airports with pronounced waves generate significantly more indirect connections relative to their number of direct connections than airports without such a structure.

How a wave is built

Every wave follows the same basic pattern. How long the individual phases are is up to the airline in its flight schedule – but the logic behind it is the same everywhere.

The minimum connecting time determines how close together the arrival and departure phases may move. In Frankfurt, Lufthansa raised it to a uniform 60 minutes with the summer 2025 schedule for several connection types – such as intra-European to intra-European and from the Schengen area to the US; before that, exceptions of 45 to 50 minutes applied to these cases. Longer connection times pull the waves further apart in time. What minimum connecting times mean for travelers is explained in the article Connecting at a hub.

Frankfurt and Munich: two hubs, one principle

Frankfurt Airport and Munich Airport are the two German hubs of Lufthansa. Within the Lufthansa Group, Swiss in Zurich and Austrian Airlines in Vienna also run their own hubs. Through the Star Alliance, partner airlines come into play, whose flights are often timed to match the hub’s waves.

Lufthansa doesn’t publish on an ongoing basis how many waves a hub runs per day, and the structure changes with network decisions. One historical reference point: in 2014, Lufthansa announced it would reduce the number of daily banks in Munich from eight to six to simplify operations. Whether and how that has changed since is most reliably read from the current flight schedule – not from old numbers.

Both airports also have night flight rules that frame the day. In Frankfurt, no scheduled flights are allowed between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. The first wave of the day therefore begins when the quiet period ends, and the last one has to be finished before it starts. The details for both airports are in the overview Night flight bans at German airports.

Feature	What it means for the waves	What you get out of it as a spotter
Night flight rules	The first and last waves sit tight against the edges of the day	Early in the morning the first big surge often arrives, and in the evening it gets busy once more before quiet hours
Long-haul arrivals in the morning	Many overnight flights from Asia and North America land early	Widebodies in the morning light, before the feeder wave starts
Minimum connecting time	Determines the gap between the arrival and departure peaks	You can roughly estimate when the departure wave follows after an arrival wave
Summer and winter schedules	The waves are rearranged twice a year	Use notes from the last half year only as a starting point

When widebody aircraft typically arrive in and depart from Europe is described in the guide Long-haul arrival times in Europe. In Frankfurt and Munich, that often means: in the morning, keep an eye out for landing Airbus A350-900 or Boeing 787-9 aircraft; later in the day, the long-haul departures take center stage.

Finding waves yourself in the flight schedule

You don’t need insider knowledge to know the waves of your hub. The airport’s arrivals and departures board or a flight tracking site is enough. How to read this data in general is explained in the article Using the arrivals and departures board for spotting.

1. Choose a time grid: Divide the day into 15- or 30-minute blocks.
2. Count only the hub airline: Lufthansa and its group partners as well as Star Alliance partners form the waves. Count codeshare numbers only once, otherwise some flights get doubled.
3. Note arrivals and departures separately: Two columns, one per direction.
4. Mark the peaks: Where arrivals rise sharply and, a little under an hour later, departures do too, you’ve found a wave.
5. Compare with the live picture: On a live map you see the arrival phase as a long chain of aircraft on approach.

One catch remains: flight schedules show scheduled times. Delays shift individual flights, and on days with thunderstorms or bottlenecks, a wave frays. How reliable the predicted arrival times on flight tracker sites are is examined in the article How accurate are ETA predictions?.

How to plan your spotting day around the waves

If you know the waves, you can structure your day instead of standing at the fence for hours on a hunch. Three strategies have proven themselves.

You can observe this well in Frankfurt. With a west wind, the landings on the southern runway glide past the Zeppelinheim viewing platform. Which direction is currently being flown depends on the wind; the guide Understanding the runway direction in use explains that. Everything else about the Frankfurt locations is in the Frankfurt plane spotting guide.

In Munich, the visitors’ hill (Besucherhügel) is the classic base, because from there you look over the grounds from an elevated position and can follow the taxiing between the waves well. You’ll find more on the Munich options in the Munich plane spotting guide.

When airlines flatten the waves: de-peaking

Banking has a price. For the peaks, an airline needs enough gates, apron staff, buses, baggage belts and crews – capacity that sits unused in the valley. Delays also spread quickly in a tightly timed system: if one arrival is stuck, onward flights wait or connecting passengers miss their flight. Why flights get delayed in the first place is explained in the article Reasons for flight delays.

Some airlines therefore deliberately flatten their waves. This is called de-peaking or a rolling hub. A much-cited example is American Airlines: after the slump in air traffic following September 11, 2001, the airline spread its flights at Chicago O’Hare and Dallas/Fort Worth more evenly across the day in 2002 to save costs. In 2015 it returned to pronounced waves in Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth, and for 2026 another restructuring in Dallas/Fort Worth became known – toward more, but less dense, banks. That shows: the wave structure isn’t a constant of nature but a trade-off between connection quality and operational stability that airlines make anew again and again.

What to keep in mind

• Watch for schedule changes. The waves are rearranged with the summer and winter schedules. What applied in July often doesn’t fit in November. More in the article Summer and winter schedules.
• Slots limit the peaks. Even the hub airline can’t pack an unlimited number of flights into a quarter of an hour – the airport’s capacity is regulated through slots. That’s why waves at large airports stretch over a certain period.
• Runway direction in use beats the flight schedule. The densest wave is no use to you if it lands on the runway at the other end of the grounds. Check wind and active runways beforehand.
• Other airlines follow their own rhythms. Many long-haul flights by foreign airlines are timed to their own hub and therefore often land independently of the Lufthansa waves.
• Waves are a pattern, not a timetable. Individual flights can be canceled, delayed or sit differently from day to day. Plan with a buffer.

Your personal wave calendar

The most useful thing is your own observation over a few visits. Note when the first landing wave began, when it got quiet and when the departure queue formed. After a few weeks, you’ll know your hub’s rhythms better than any table – and you’ll notice right away when something shifts.

If you’re just starting out, the guide Plane spotting for beginners helps you with your first spots. There you can try out the wave principle directly: stand at the fence once during a peak and once in a valley, and compare what you get to see in the same amount of time.

Conclusion

Hub waves are the invisible clock system of large hubs. Network airlines like Lufthansa bundle arrivals and departures so that as many connections as possible arise – and in doing so create the peaks and valleys you experience at the fence. The exact times change with every flight schedule, the principle stays. Count the flights, combine the result with runway direction and light, and use the quiet phases for switching spots or hunting for exotics.