This video provides a peek at a typical day of FedEx airplane traffic over the continental United States.
The video starts in the wee hours after midnight. Starting around 2:30 in the morning, a wave of flights take off from all over the United States, most of them converging on FedEx’s Super Hub in Memphis from 4am to 7am. Around 9am a new wave of flights takes off from the Memphis hub, going every direction. As these flights start arriving at their destinations, a new wave of flights starts taking off from all over the US, once again most of them converging on the Memphis Super Hub from 1pm to 7pm. Around 8:30pm starts another mass exodus from Memphis, with planes flying in every direction all over the country, most of them arriving by 2am.
Of course, the video shows where FedEx’s smaller hubs tend to appear, based on locations with quite a few flights arriving and departing from the same point in a short time frame. The video is also peppered by random flights between various cities that aren’t part of the major waves of flights in and out of the main hubs.
What’s interesting is how this differs from the earlier video showing UPS air traffic. In that video, there were two large waves of flights: one coming into UPS’s WorldPort hub in Louisville, Kentucky in the late evening, and then one coming out of it in the early hours of the morning. Contrast this to FedEx which has four major waves of flights to their largest hub: one arriving in the early morning and departing shortly after, and another arriving in the afternoon and departing at night.
Obviously, each video is just a one-day snapshot in the life of either carrier, but it’s interesting all the same.