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Originally Posted by AirlinesMustPay
But I thought you had been referring earlier to losing your spot because now you have to get back in line for take off. I was not suggesting that you delay the flights ready to land. In any case these flights in the air will land whether the aircraft went back to the gate after 3 hours or whether it remained on the tarmac.
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Actually I was referring to a plane ready for takeoff that had to sit. The problem is the plane will be given a very narrow window to takeoff. If the plane goes back to the gate, it will miss that window. Let me explain a bit further what I was talking about
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Let's use Delta as our example, with a flight going from Tampa to Atlanta. Atlanta's weather goes to pot, and later clears up. But the plane has already pushed the gate in Tampa. Granted 3 hours is quite extreme, no argument on that. But let's say the plane did sit. Keep in mind that there are going to be a large number of other airplanes around the country trying to get to Atlanta. Now, let's say some of our delayed planes are now going to arrive in ATL at 6pm. All quite late. Well, they get there, but there were already a large number of planes due to arrive at 6pm. So ATL's air traffic load just shot up.
Because of this, each of those sitting planes will be given a takeoff time. The idea is that they need to arrive in ATL's airspace and land at a certain time. So if a plane misses it's takeoff window, it will arrive later than it was assigned, and now crowd another flight.
Let's now complicate things even further. ATL gets plenty of widebody aircraft. When one takes off or lands, you cannot have another do the same right behind it without a 2 minute window. These larger aircraft create heavy wake turbulence that can push another aircraft around, and crash it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AirlinesMustPay
The Federal regulation that may be necessary would be for ATC to permit this delayed aircraft back into the conga line for take off.
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It's not that there is a conga line, per se. Refer to the above. But what I just pointed out was a case of a plane that is not in a hub. You are not going to have lines of planes in an out station normally. Because if ATL is shot, Delta and AirTran are screwed, but the other airlines would be OK, since none of them are headed to ATL.
However, it's time now to look at the other end of the coin, that being the hub. So let's look at ATL. While the weather went bad, the planes probably were not able to take off. Now they can. But remember, we have to get these planes off the gates to make room for all those arriving flights. So now in the hub they do start a conga line on the taxi way, but if the taxi ways to line up, there is no physical way for a plane to taxi back to a gate. And at the same time, no way for a plane at the gate to jump the line. And let's not forget that 2 minute separation for wide bodies.
Jim is right to a certain degree. Look at any large airport at the number of gates verses the runway space. It is all designed for when things go right. ATL did at least do something about this a few years ago and put in another runway, and they don't have quite the same congestion problems they used to. While this would be a great solution, it's not feasible in many cases because often you don't have the room, or you have people that don't want planes now flying over their homes.
However, Jim, part of this too is the fact that there is no other country in the world that has about 400 domestic airports. So, the hubs are quite crowded. Most of the international airlines only fly a couple flights a day to the cities they serve just because of the length of the flights. It keeps the fleet spread out more. And there aren't as many short haul flights. So that itself will keep down the number of airplanes on the ground at one time.