Flight ......Delayed.
Want to know why your flight is late?
James Fallows at Get the Flick will tell you:
The math is as simple as it is inescapable. Roughly 60 airliners can use a runway in one hour if conditions are absolutely perfect. It is physically impossible to improve that number. However, it can get a lot worse.
The runway -- the system -- must have some “give” to it. It must have some unused capacity in order to ensure safety. In reality it does. That unused capacity is after midnight. That is the reason you see flights arriving at 1 or 2 AM after a day of bad weather. There is no “give” -- during normal hours -- in the system when there is adverse weather. This leads to the massive flight delays Americans suffered through this summer.
The reason is as old as it is simple -- greed. Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle.
James Fallows at Get the Flick will tell you:
The math is as simple as it is inescapable. Roughly 60 airliners can use a runway in one hour if conditions are absolutely perfect. It is physically impossible to improve that number. However, it can get a lot worse.
The runway -- the system -- must have some “give” to it. It must have some unused capacity in order to ensure safety. In reality it does. That unused capacity is after midnight. That is the reason you see flights arriving at 1 or 2 AM after a day of bad weather. There is no “give” -- during normal hours -- in the system when there is adverse weather. This leads to the massive flight delays Americans suffered through this summer.
The reason is as old as it is simple -- greed. Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle.
Labels: ATC, FAA, flight delays
posted by Cargosquid at 12:59 PM
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