And seriously, I wish I had a computer program that could figure it out. Your calculations are interesting and suggest it's not as much of a problem as I thought. It just bugs me every time I'm on a flight that does the loop - it just seems like such a waste.

There was a time a number of years ago where flights heading east did not do the loop. I didn't know enough about flight patterns then to understand how they did it. Maybe there were more delays and ground holds waiting for an opening - which probably was just as inefficient, if not more so.