Originally Posted by
Russell745
Why can't CO prioritize within their own flights though? Pulling back fom the gate in Newark on a flight to IAH and going to the end of a line 20 planes long seems a recipe for "disaster". When 80% of the planes in the queue are CO, and all of the other CO flights are O&D why not move the IAH as far to the front as possible to avoid all of the misconnections that could occur from the wait?
Russell,
CO does attempt to do this but much of the decision is out of our control. ATC has to release the flight and ground/tower have to be able to physically make a hole in the traffic to fit it in. I have been on a flight where this has happened. Pushed back at EWR and were about #35 for takeoff. Ground tells us to cross 4L, taxi down P in between the runways, contact tower. We switch to tower, they clear us to takeoff. We passed more than 30 aircraft.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the company tracks how long it takes us from push to takeoff and uses that historical data to schedule the push/arrival times. That's why you will sometimes see a large difference between the times on your ticket (push/arrival) and the flight time announced by the captain. I've seen planned taxi times at EWR as high 1 hour 15 minutes. The flight time from EWR-IAH might be 3:45 but the difference between your dep/arr times on your ticket would be 5:00 (plus a few minutes of taxi in IAH). So even though you sit for an hour waiting to takeoff you could still arrive IAH in time to make connections. Not ideal but it works with what we can control.
Clear as mud?
