Why don't late flights, once en route, get prioritized in the air and at the airport
 

I had a flight this past weekend that left the gate 10 minutes late because the plane was waiting for crew. I had a tight connection at the destination airport. But:

1. The ground crew at the first airport took forever to pull the jetway back and push the plane back.
2. At the destination airport, the plane sat on the taxiway in traffic; what would usually be just a few minutes between touchdown and arrival at the gate took at least 10 minutes.

So I missed my connection.

When a flight is already late, why don't crews at the airport prioritize it (and let it go in front of other planes on the taxiway, and expedite things at the gate)?

my first guess is that the flight you’re on probably isn’t the only late flight that the arrival airport is dealing with; even if it is, the airline’s ramp operations are independent of the FAA’s ground controllers

my story involves a late inbound jet to DCA, leading to a late departure for DTW; we landed on 3R (the east runway), and taxied all the way around the south end of the terminal … as we turned to park at A68 I could see the jet we were supposed to be on for SLC (and thence PSP) being pushed back from A70

three hours later we were on a nonstop to LAX, seated in 11D and 28A instead of 3C and 3D

yeah, it’s never fun to misconnect, but you just have to suck it up and deal with the situation

The airlines do priorities late flights.

ATC has no system in place to do so.

Overall, consider (as another poster has mentioned), you're likely not the only one who is late or on a tight schedule...

But consider...

1) If you're already in the taxi lane, how do you propose to "skip" ahead of other planes? Who's "late takeoff" should take priority? Also remember there are constantly planes both taking off and landing. The pause between either activity is to avoid backwash interfering with the next plane. Shortening the interval could cause a plane to crash.

2) Once you've landed, what is the expectation? Other people are expecting to move on with their journeys too... effectively, why should they be delayed (further) because your flight was late getting in (regardless of reason). About the only reason I would expect to yield a gate while moving towards it is if there were an inbound medical emergency. There might be other similar situations, but not much else.

I generally avoid any flights where I know I could miss the MCT (eg, I will include a buffer when designing my itinerary). Could that be fouled up? Sure. But more often than not, I don't have reason to worry. And for the odd times I do miss my connection, I either have an alternative that I can present to the transfer desk, or they will have made the arrangements already. It's a bit more painful for international flights, but domestic, not too concerned). If I don't need the buffer, then I just use the extra time to relax, surf the web somehow, find a quiet spot to hunker down and try food that i haven't tried before. It's just a couple hours to do something different.

Every minute presumably has value in the airline industry, yet they sure seem not to act that way. Of course there are very complex overlapping operational considerations that customers don't understand, but I can confidently opine that, in general, ground handling processes at airports are poor and/or they don't much care.

This occurs at a macro level too. For example, Qatar Airways used to have something like 20 flights per day to Dubai, which they advertised as a convenient shuttle-type service. This was one of the minority of their services that was O/D focused and it also catered to high-end business travelers. You'd think they would assign a couple of the gates closest to the entrance/exit, never require a bus transfer for these flights, and otherwise take simple steps to make the experience as convenient as possible (even dedicated passport and check-in areas for these flights, also intelligently located, would be a nice innovation). Yet they took none of these steps. The flights seemed to arrive at random gates, often far away, sometimes requiring a bus, even when the new airport was not that busy. Maybe they'd have less leverage in Dubai of course, but at least in Doha they could have made it easier.

Sorry, I must not have been clear.

At the departure airport, when the airplane door closed 10 minutes after the scheduled departure time, it was a small airport and there were no other planes arriving or leaving then. Yet my plane sat there at the gate for a while more before it was pushed back from the gate. Why? There were no other planes needing ground crew assistance; why did that take so long.

And at the arrival airport, once we landed, we just crawled along and stopped frequently, sitting there on the tarmac to let planes come and go.

My main gripe is about the departure airport, a small one with only a few gates. If my plane would have been pushed back from the gate when the airplane door first closed, we could have arrived on time. But we just sat there, as though the ground crew was taking a break or something.

There might have been ATC delays, pilots receiving new info, a problem with the equipment, any number of things beyond the ground crew taking a break.

Re: As dinoscool3 has mentioned, there could be any number of reasons. A weather pattern which has changed path (which is becoming more common these days) or congestion at the destination airport (there are rules that limit the number of airplanes in the air and on the ground in a given area). A path re-calculation, not enough slots being open for departure due to something happening (not likely at a small airport, but that depends on your definition of small).... No-one wants to just sit on the runway waiting. That's usually the most stressful time for them.

And once you arrive, same thing. Congestion.... knock-on effects are common. When one of the airlines has an IT meltdown, it's felt all over the world. Same for flight delays. All the onward-bound passengers need to be accommodated somehow. To a point, some of those things are accounted for, but not everything can be.

Often controllers are saturated with planes and can't take more flights until some land. That's why there's going to be delays at the gate and at times when a/c pull of the taxi ways to wait. It could also be the destination airport is backed up and halts flight taking off for that airport for some period of time.

Small airport with fewer resources so the ground crew could have moved to their next scheduled task. Coming back to deal with your flight then makes every subsequent flight delayed. Better to have one flight delayed for longer than several flights for shorter periods?

I have tried to get an answer to this question many times before but can't. It happens routinely at all types of planes and at all types of airports. Door closes, you push back and then you just sit and sit and sit. 5, 10, 15 minutes or more. What on earth is going on? Presumably, everything was checked, double checked and triple checked or we wouldn't have left the gate. Why on earth are we just sitting halfway out of the gate? No other planes can come in to the gate, many probably have trouble going by to other gates.

In the end I guess I'm just thankful that whatever is taking place gets me to my destination safely but it is it quite a curious phenomenon.

In most cases, you're waiting for traffic to clear and to join your place in the sequence for departure.

sometimes there’s a jet in the alley behind yours; sometimes ground control is playing Tetris with 8 (or 18, or 28) other jets on taxiways (as well as the host of catering trucks, service vehicles, etc on the tarmac); sometimes the flight crew have to contact dispatch or ops …

If the captain didn't make an announcement as to what was going on, this will forever remain a mystery.

I would say that it's extremely unlikely that the ground crew decided to just sit around and do nothing for 10 minutes.

Ground crew ops are kind of a mystery. Just recently (and to OP's point) my inbound plane had to sit and wait due to a mechanical issue with the plane occupying our gate. The problematic lane was fixed and left the gate about two hours late. At this point the inbound plane had sat away from the gate for about 90 minutes. So, gate is empty but nothing happened. The pilots for my flight were mulling around and I asked them what was going on and they said there was no ground crew available. So, it was another 45 minutes before the plane could pull in. I would have thought that we'd get into some priority line for a ground crew since we were already late but I guess not.

The airport was OGG (Maui) which is usually okay but it doesn't take much for things to go sideways. I suppose the same can be said for any airport.

Good luck getting the different airlines to agree to having their on time flights depart late and arrive late because another plane is late arriving.

I was on a flight from DAL to LGA which waited for late arriving passengers resulting in the flight cancellation since LGA has a curfew. I switched to AA DFW to EWR for future flights.

I was flying private out of OGG once and the tower delayed our departure so bad my pilot buddy ripped them on the radio. Upon our return we had to call the senior supervisor. Turns out the staff at OGG had a personal vendetta against my friend and enjoyed making his life miserable.

Just curious - when you say that "Upon our return we had to call the senior supervisor" - did the tower require you to call or, in order to report the controllers' behaviors, you had to call?

David

Tower asked him to call. It’s a long back story of when he worked at Hawaiian Airlines. These two apparently don’t get along.

Wow. There's a bunch rolled up together there. Does he still fly into OGG?

David

No, he is in Montana now. I’ve never seen him get so mad on the radio. We had flown together multiple times, but that day the tower upset him (I was fine). It was only during our island hopping that day that he told me what happened between the two of them. I won’t share details but I believe my friend did the right thing.

I wanted to fly to Midway, half joking as I knew we didn’t have the fuel for it, nor was it allowed anymore. He was so upset he didn’t care and said fly wherever you want Jeff. So I island hopped for hours while he sat mostly silent. I was in the middle of a divorce, so my life wasn’t spectacular at the time either.

Back on topic, the annoyance was that the tower held us for almost 30 minutes before we could depart OGG. 182’s don’t have air conditioning, and it was hot sitting still. He was very vocal and expressed his displeasure.

The history of these two goes back decades, they were even best friends for a while.

Great... now when I fly to/from OGG I'm going to worry the control guy is busy hassling/fighting with pilots rather than paying attention to my plane :)

That's a crazy story! But not hard to believe given the way people are. Aren't communications and decisions/actions by controllors public (or reviewable, etc.)? Seems like control guy is risking a lot by being a PITA just to be a PITA.

I'd be a lot more worried going into NY Tracon airspace. There was an audio clip posted of an N90 controller who took up tons of radio time repeatedly berating a B6 pilot and threatening a 360 for resequencing for not being at the speed the controller would have liked (apparently prior sector never issued a restriction noted as "expect" on the STAR).

If an procedure tells me to expect a fix at a speed and/or altitude but ATC doesn't actually assign that restriction, there is no requirement to comply with it.

Rather than just assigning a speed as the pilot asked several times, the controller spent tons of time cluttering up the frequency with his one-way pissing match. The best part of that being that the controller harped on and on about his need to move traffic efficiently. Well, you know what's not efficient? Chewing out a pilot on the air when a simple "Maintain 220 knots." would have been sufficient.

What airport and STAR was that?

Typically, the altitudes are EXCEPT, the airspeeds are AT. You fly the charted airspeed unless told to do otherwise.

I will have to see if I can find the audio clip again. Was several years ago. I'm guessing it was JFK since it was an N90 controller and B6 has a lot more service to JFK than any other N90 airport.

Maybe a previous version of the LENDY STAR? The current LENDY7 has expect LENDY at FL190 and 250 KIAS.

If you are juggling, for example, 10 planes, each with 150 passengers on board, and one of them is already 30 minutes late, and the others are on time, it's tempting to say that you should prioritise the late flight. But if that means making all the other flights a little late, or one of the other flights a lot late, it's probably a worse outcome for the airline and most of its passengers. 150 people are already late and angry. If they are a little later, they probably won't be much angrier. If you make an extra 150 people very late, then you end up with 300 people late and angry. Or you could make an extra 1350 people a little late and, depending upon the circumstance, you leave all 1500 people with a bad impression of your airline.

If a plane is late, it is absent from the queue (takeoff or landing) so others in the queue is advanced by one notch each. Then when the late plane shows up and is given priority, others give back the notch they each gained, suffering on average a net delay caused by the late plane of zero.

Or did I miss something?

Um.... couple of things..A plane cannot just "jump the queue"... let's assume it fails to leave the gate on time, it has to request a new departure slot. There is no physical way for a plane to bump into a line. Also, the planes have been given the new slots... you can't just take them back as there are other considerations (eg, the anti-freeze pads in the winter or the gaps between landing flights and takeoffs, etc). If you're late, you're late, end of story.

There's a dozen reasons why an aircraft could "just sit" there after door closes. Since this was a small airport, I'm betting this wasn't the ground crew. Maybe there was an issue with the final weights and performance. Maybe the wind shifted and the takeoff runway was changed. This happened to me just last night WHILE we were pushing back. It takes a few minutes to reprogram the FMC and double check the thrust numbers and V-speeds. We also have to go over the new departure procedure and single engine procedures if there are any. It could have been an ATC reroute. That also takes 5 or 10 minutes to reprogram the FMC and make sure there's a enough fuel on board. There could have been last minute maintenance paperwork to finish up. If its something minor and the thing is fixed or MEL'd we can still close the door to get things going while waiting on maintenance control to send the final sign off via ACARS or over the phone. They could have also been waiting for a EDCT time (wheels up) time issued by ATC. This is pretty common for going into a hub and if at a small airport its certainly more prudent to not run the engines if you have to.

Once airborne, ATC has no idea if you're late or not. But the pilots will try to go faster, (burning more fuel) and they will ask for shortcuts. This can save a few minutes, but thats about it. If available they can ask for a closer runway, but that is not always available depending on how busy it is. DFW, in general, arrivals coming from the east will last on the east complex, west arrivals on the west side, regardless of the terminal. If it's really busy, there's no changing sides. If not busy, ATC will often accommodate aircraft parking on the opposite complex.

Once on the ground, its difficult to prioritize late aircraft. About the only thing that the airline itself can do is to make sure there's an open gate at the hub, and they already do this anyway. Ramp controllers will hold the push of one aircraft if another is coming in behind it, for example.

Summary. They do trying to prioritize late flights, but its not always possible.

When the cabin is ready to depart (door closed, jetbridge retracted) but we don't push back right away it is usually waiting for the final bags to be loaded and/or waiting for our pushback clearance.

The ramp personnel can see the status of checked bags and cargo for the flight on their wireless/scanning devices. They know if checked bags are missing and will wait without the guidelines that have been established for them. We don't have that information up front. We just see that a cargo door is still open.

Depending on the airport, our pushback can be delayed by other traffic and congestion on the ramp. DEN is one of the best with all of the room they have which allows us to push straight back without getting in the way of arrivals or departures from nearby gates. EWR and LAX are the worst. Single alleys mean that a pushback will block incoming arrivals as well as other pushbacks.

Less frequency, we are still preparing the cockpit (when we arrived late from our last inbound flight), are dealing with a maintenance issue (waiting for the paperwork to come over ACARS), programming an ATC re-route, or modifying our flight plan with dispatch.