What is the record for EWR gate changes in a 3 hour span?
 

Rarely use EWR but had to laugh at all the gate changes on my connecting EWR-BTV flight this afternoon.
Fortunately, I can monitor the gate action from the attractive UC.

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I had 4 gate changes 12/25 EWR-EDI. Got a tour of terminal C. At least I got my steps in!

At least they're all in the C gates.

Yeah - for the people on the inbound plane: "See, there's a gate. Oops, full. See, there's a gate. Oops, full again. See, there's a gate...."

David

No more gate changes and we finally departed 50 minutes late.

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And arrived an hour late in a blizzard.

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Apparently the captain decided that the crew had worked enough today as he announced that "due to severe turbulence all the way to Burlington, I've asked the FA to stay seated for the entire flight". And of course, other than one 5 second mild chop, there wasn't a hint of turbulence during the flight.

And on approach, the front cabin FA started walking down the aisle with a trash bag just as the rear FA announced "due the turbulence, we won't be collecting trash today..." :D

Also turbulence forecasting is imperfect.

I hope this wasn’t your flight!


but in all seriousness, it’s annoying but that’s dispatch working in real-time. Unfortunately EWR operates right on the brink of max capacity so often, it causes chaos for gate access. This is why ground stops and things cause an utterly bad day at Newark — just not enough gates for everyone. Hoping new Terminal A capacity will help once the final set of gates open there.

Each hub has a person who's sole job is managing the gate assignments. There are a lot of complexities that they must deal with due to each gate only supporting some aircraft, the need to keep the zones balances so that there will be personnel available when they are needed, and so that the departures are not bunched up so that they'll all be in each other's way, etc.

When winds aloft are stronger, or weaker, than typical for the time of year, large numbers of flights will arrive early, or late. Other flights are early, or late for their own unique reasons. Early airplanes may arrived well before their planned gate will open. Delayed departures might remain at their gate long after the next flight arrives. All of these issues have to be sorted out and result in gate swaps.

Here's an image of the gate managers gate flow screen from a Denver morning bank that I found on Google Images some years ago. The horizontal bars indicate the time that an airplane is scheduled to be at that gate. The space between the bars is how much slop there is in the gate's schedule to absorb early/late flights.

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Great job for Tetris pros.

I had a flight some years ago on CO where we kept getting gate changes from the far end of one pier to another (EWR Terminal C) during what ended up being a ~4 hour delay. (Side point: in some ways this a fortuitous delay as my 4 hour connection inbound from MAD had all but evaporated.)

The best part though was the last part of the delay, when we had already boarded and were waiting on a mechanic who was being sent to our destination. A couple across the aisle from me asked the FA if they could go outside the plane (a Dash 8) onto the ramp and smoke while we were waiting. She looked at them like they had two heads and politely said no.

Nothing beats AA at DFW for this. I've had four gate changes inside one hour. Different terminals too.

So? If there's bad turbulence, ask them to be seated. Don't give them an "out" from working right from the start.

The real question is whether this was the same plane each time or a different ones that kept getting assigned for that flight.

I've always wondered same, and I have to imagine it's a mix, but mostly different planes. Moving planes from gate to gate would be highly inefficient.

While sometimes the gate change is result of tail change, in this case it appeared to stick with N747YX assigned the whole time. So it was pure gate change.

They aren't moving the plane itself from gate to gate, just changing the gate assignment. The plane would have been still inbound to EWR while all the gate reassignments were happening.

edit add: final gate reassignment occurred at 1617 EST, when N747YX was in flight around Finger Lakes, inbound from YYZ.