I paid attention to this on my flight today (MU, 130p departure). The airplane was an A300 -- many of you youngsters have probably never seen these; in fact, one of the FAs told me that the plane was older than her... in response to my question about IFE, but I digress; my point was that it's a big plane and there were 250+ people waiting to get on it.

When 115p rolled around and boarding hadn't started, I became convinced that this flight would be delayed by the "door closing" measure. Two minutes later, they started boarding (none of that status based stuff we have in the US; just shear chaos). But, low and behold, they managed to fill that beast up in 11 minutes and the door closed promptly at 130p.... wtg, guys! But, not so fast; we sat on the (really, really hot) tarmac for the standard 1 hour before pushing back.

Bottom line: my flight was "on time" according to the book (assuming we believe that article), and honestly, 1 hour delays are hard to get worked up about. However, I would much rather if they had "delayed" the flight and let me spend that extra hour in the air conditioned terminal. Oh, well; such is life... bring on the train!