Originally Posted by
EXP100
It was a totally different business. Flight loads averaged between 50% and 70%. Airlines didn't have schedules that included tight banks and very tight turns. Today everything has moved to the minute precision that WN developed decades ago to get planes on and off gates very quickly. For WN it was one factor in how they survived the early days. Holding a flight 5 minutes didn't have the consequences it has today.
Well it has consequences, and then it doesn't have consequences. I would think that at a minimum, AA agents should be able to confer with dispatch and the crew when 1) the plane departing is the last departure of the night and 2) the plane departing is simply going to RON at the outstation where it is going to.
Now I will admit there are a ton of variables here. For example, departures to Europe are often assigned a specific time slot and routing track. If you miss that track by 15 minutes, you could be in for a nasty delay - which affects everybody. But, if its 10:00 pm at DFW and there are six passengers who have arrived from ORD 20 minutes late and are hoping to make the 10:25 pm departure to LRD (and everybody knows that, after landing in LRD, that plane will just sit on the tarmac until 5:55 am the next morning), what is the absolute rush to get that plane off the gate at 10:25 pm when you will have six additional passengers to rebook for the following day?