This ought to stir up a hornet's nest!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-airports.html

Only for those who actually believe this rubbish.

You mean it's not true?

It's a made up, non story, page filler full of words and phrases such as, 'may soon', 'It might', 'perhaps' and 'suggestion.
It's no more than Sunday morning 'clickbait'.

It's the Daily Mail. Don't believe a word of it.

It is clickbait to ensure that their site visits are maintained and advertiser revenue pours in.

Never click on the Daily Mail. I didn't.

I can imagine how well this would work! After all BA are already great at allowing premium passengers priority when getting on to the plane, eh..?!

Visions of dozens of BA 747s going in circles trying to work out social status (No. GGLs / No. Bronze + No. MPs / No. Top Gear presenters / amount of fuel left...) while all the FRs merrily land first due to 'unplanned fuel emergency..'

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.

Nor totally rubbish, even if reported on the Daily Mail. As a senior ATCO working as a tech consultant in the some SESAR projects, in particular the AMAN (arrival manager) tool, in the future (and I mean likely after 2020) ATC will give airlines some power in order to prioritize, in case of delays and under certain conditions, many of their flights. This procedure could be based on aircraft rotation or sequencing, or connecting pax, or any other consideration under airline control.
Unfortunately I cannot give any further details but some documents will be soon available on SESAR website.

I can forecast this thread now on FT "I am GGL flying F and my plane was held for 10 minutes, what compensation am I due?".

BA used to have some limited ability to prioritise amongst our own flights when holding became excessive. We used to tell our own ops what our fuel endurance before diversion was if given lengthy holding delays. BA would then liaise with ATC allowing aircraft with less endurance to perhaps land at destination rather than divert. This system was not used to put premium pax first but to allow aircraft with less fuel a greater chance of landing by swapping their place in the queue with another company aircraft with more holding time available.

Let's hope if you're low on fuel you're on the babybus back into LCY from JFK as at least then ALL pax are premium so you should get priority!

Well I finally got round to reading the Sunday papers and it turns out the DM wasn't the only journalistic outfit to cover Richard Deakin's lecture. I was more interested in the suggestion that airlines will fly their aircraft in formation in the near future to maximise efficiency. Not to mention the dream of hypersonic flight at 100,000 feet. And the article came on the page prior to a double page spread advert for hearhrow expansion, pointing out greater benefits than gatwick expansion.

Airlines already use models to calculate cost of delays and use this information to make a decision which flight they will be delaying. The cost of a delay is for instance determined by number of connecting passengers, amount of premium passengers , ability to catch up with some of the delay etcetera.
I have no insight in how challenging it would be to integrate these (airline) decision models in ATC procedures.

Rubbish. This would necessitate a complete rework of the queuing model used at LHR. Fuel endurance will always trump convenience. Given so many flights into LHR are long legs, it seems unlikely anyone would be able to trump those flights. Domestic and other short haul will be held on the ground. That's the new reality. Even those high value JFK-LHR flights get slotted to arrive within a very tight time window.

How soon will this thread close ? WASTE of time !