Cathay Pacific Airways Limited (CPA), more widely known as Cathay Pacific, is the flag carrier of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region with its head office and main hub located at Hong Kong International Airport. The airline's operations and its subsidiaries have scheduled passenger and cargo services to over 190 destinations and more than 60 countries worldwide including codeshares and joint ventures. Cathay Pacific operates a fleet consisting of Airbus A321neo, Airbus A330, Airbus A350, and Boeing 777 aircraft. Cathay Cargo operates two models of Boeing 747. Defunct wholly-owned subsidiary airline Cathay Dragon, which ceased operations in 2020, operated to 44 destinations in the Asia-Pacific region from its Hong Kong base. In 2010, Cathay Pacific and Cathay Cargo, together with Cathay Dragon, transported nearly 27 million passengers and over 1.8 million tons of cargo and mail.

An airline hub or hub airport is an airport used by one or more airlines to concentrate passenger traffic and flight operations. Hubs serve as transfer points to help get passengers to their final destination. It is part of the hub-and-spoke system. An airline may operate flights from several non-hub (spoke) cities to the hub airport, and passengers traveling between spoke cities connect through the hub. This paradigm creates economies of scale that allow an airline to serve city-pairs that could otherwise not be economically served on a non-stop basis. This system contrasts with the point-to-point model, in which there are no hubs and nonstop flights are instead offered between spoke cities. Hub airports also serve origin and destination (O&D) traffic.