Like others, I suspect this to be complete nonsense. I have no doubt that the new smart technologies allow ATC to make more information about landing priorities, and indeed, I have no doubt that airlines may even have a chance to request some priorities.

I'm sure some people dislike the change and I suspect they were the ones imagining how this could enable airline to prioritise "gold card holders" in order to try and provoke some hostility to the idea. In practice, my guess is that airlines will either provide some generic priority preferences (e.g. domestic) or at most specific priorities due to operational fluidity (e.g. prioritise an aircraft due to fly again in two hours over one which will go for its weekly maintenance after landing, prioritise an aircraft from which most passengers are connecting over one which tends to be O/D traffic mainly). the whole Gold/ F assumption is, in my estimate, absurd.