LSLGuy, thanks for the informative posts.
13 hours??? That would be something close to hell on earth. Would there be a reason that the plane could not have been restocked to help keep passengers from declaring war on the flight crew?
Is that an automatic pink slip? Or just a royal chewing-out?
In March 1998, on a flight from Detroit to Montreal, we landed without incident but taxied for 45 minutes behind, as the pilot explained, a snowplow that was clearing our way. More amusing than a horror story like some of the above.
Seems to me that even if you couldn’t take off, controllers could have used the runway to re-position planes. If there were 20 planes queued up, start sending them down the runway in order, 1, 2, 3, etc. and to the back of the line; the ones that need to get out of line head back to the terminal, until plane #1 is back at the front of the line again.
On the other hand, some of those planes probably didn’t have enough fuel to start their flights, but enough to idle for a few more hours. As long as the line started moving before they ran out completely they’d be okay.
So this all took place at your hub; planes that couldn’t arrive because of the storm had diverted, refueled, and gotten to the hub before the backlog of departing planes had been cleared?
On those snow days when the incoming planes get trapped out on the taxiways without a gate to unload at, the planes that are at the gates are empty, right? I wouldn’t think the airline would load them with passengers if the conditions wouldn’t allow them to take off for hours. Seems like they could move a few of the empty planes out to the taxiway (put them at the back of the line) and cycle the full planes through those gates until you had everybody off. How much crew do you need just to move an airliner around a little; can you do it with just one guy and a tug, or do you need a full crew on board with the engines running?
True sorta. The usual way these things snowball is the situation is expected to improve soon. So both ATC & airline management are loth to make big swingeing decisions to reconfigure when if we just sit tight for another 20-40 minutes the problem will start to self-clear. Then *soon *slowly morphs into much later. And now we’re in a pickle. And yes, in the story I told they did eventually end up moving a few airplanes in and out of line to get a few folks back to gates.
Yes. Paradoxically the airlines for which this was not a hub fared much better. They may have had only 3 gates to our 100, but they had 2 airplanes for their 3 gates while we had 200 airplanes for our 100 gates.
I guess you didn’t read the part where I said we could process 2 to 2-1/2 airplanes per *hour *through *each *spare gate but had 120 outbound airplanes to deal with.
Generally all the airplanes at the gates are full of people trying to leave. Each seat might not be filled, but each airplane is trying to leave with some payload. As always, the problem is that we don’t know how long the stoppage or slowdown will last. And we do know that it’ll take time to load the plane & taxi out after conditions do improve. If we left all departing passengers in the building until we knew takeoffs were already happening, that decision is also decision to have every one of our jets depart 60-90 minutes later than they otherwise would if we pre-loaded and cocked them out by the runway to await the weather opening up.
Folks don’t want to sit on airplanes. We get that; really we do. But in those situations, the terminal itself is no paradise. Things may actually be calmer & cooler on board than in that zoo back in the building.
Folks also don’t want to be 90 minutes later to their destination than need be. And the later they become, the more follow-on consequences we have with running out of crew duty day, or ground crews’ shifts ending or having today’s afternoon / evening problems impacting tomorrow’s morning schedule. Not to mention that however bad connections at the next station will be for our passengers, adding an extra hour plus to the delay can only make that problem even worse.
Bottom line: there’s a strong incentive to be ready to lift off as soon as it’s possible. Which implies doing all the upstream stuff as soon as possible as well.
To taxi an airplane with even 1 passenger on board requires 2 pilots and a full crew of flight attendants. To taxi an airplane with no passengers and no flight attendants requires 2 pilots or 2 taxi-qualified mechanics. To tow an airplane requires a tug driver and a single taxi-qualified mechanic in the cockpit. Most tugs and tow crews are not permitted to leave airline property; IOW, they can move airplanes on the ramp, but not on taxiways. Likewise most tugs aren’t fast enough to be allowed on taxiways. There are special high powered fast tugs for moving airplanes on taxiways.
A big hub will have a just handful of taxi-qualified mechanics & taxiway-capable tugs. Using excess stranded pilots is the best way to move lots of aircraft around the grounds.
My bottom line: In the last couple of years, as a direct response to these regulations and the consumer sentiment they legitimately represent, airline management has altered their overall strategy for dealing with hub collapses, both potential and actual. And also for dealing with spoke collapses which are *much *simpler, but broadly similar.
Now we cancel large swathes of flights *much *earlier in the process. Like the decision is made 12 or 24 hours ahead of the weather. The goal is to leave the passenger still at home, at their hotel, or at their business meeting rather than bringing them all out to the airport in the vain hope they’ll go someplace sometime later tonight.
When the weather turns out to be as bad as (or worse than) predicted this actually works real well; for the folks who stay away they avoid a lot of frustration, and for the folks who do transit the crippled hub they have much, much closer to a normal experience.
On the days the weather ends up much better than predicted and the cancellations prove excessive to the actual need, well … we just inconvenienced a few thousand people unnecessarily and lost a few million extra dollars. But we avoided DOT fines and we avoided being laughed at by the “experts” on 24 hour news.
That part of my post wasn’t meant to be about that particular day of backed-up departures, but rather to those horror story days of the past few years when it was clear that nobody was going anywhere but full planes were still stuck on the taxiways. Although, credit to the industry where it’s due, I haven’t heard one of those stories for a while now.
Thanks for your informative posts.
When I planned aircraft routes I used 15 minutes for ATL taxi time.
Have you had experience with the TaxiBot? Impressively (to me) it’s apparently a real thing; who knows how its integration will bring new types of screw ups.
ETA: just saw it’s not yet in service. Read too quickly.
[QUOTE=CC]
…we arrived in Chicago 2 1/2 hours late. Before we landed the pilot told us we’d be taxiing for about 5 minutes after we landed. We landed. And we taxied for closer to 10 - maybe more. It seemed as if we were taking a tour of the airport. … Or was there another reason we took that tour?
[/QUOTE]
Was the pilot’s name Schettino? Maybe he wanted to taxi past his mom’s home in Bensenville and wave to her. 
Bu t yes, I’ve had flights land at ORD, only to slowly bump along on what felt like a 350-degree loop of the airport. Not sure, but we might have been on the El tracks for a while as well.
This is probably the one and only advantage of those airports still in love with the remote gate. They have lots of those specially configured runway buses, airstairs and whatnot.
And the little miniature choo-choo trains for luggage that I’ve always wanted to have a go at driving. So I could experiment with whiplashing the carts full of luggage and see how far it is possible to propel suitcases down the apron…
I want to know how they get that thing out of the way once the airplane reaches the runway.
The taxibot would have to either drive down the runway to the next exit taxiway, or perhaps detach itself and do a 180 before entering the runway.
The expectation is the taxibot would detach from the airplane near the end of the runway and return to the gate area on a nearby dedicated vehicle roadway. (FYI, big airports have an extensive road network which is interspersed between the various taxiways & runways & aprons & such. They’re not obvious since they have very little traffic on them most times. But they’re there.)
Meanwhile the pilots would start the aircraft engines shortly before stopping to disconnect the taxibot. Once disconnected and with engines started the aircraft would be ready to enter the runway.
The “bot” part is all new and not yet in service. The rest of that vehicle (with a live human driver) is colloquially called a “supertug” and has been used for 15+ years at some airports to drag airplanes from the gate area to near the runway. More often they’re used to drag airplanes, especially really big ones, between the gate area and remote maintenance facilities.
The fuel savings of supertugs or taxibots are nice, and make the eco-folks in Europe all go SQUEEEE!! The thing management wants most is to eliminate ground worker headcount. So they’re pretty excited about taxibot.
Along similar lines …
The industry is working up another experimental effort to install electric motors inside the nose gear of A320 & 737 aircraft. See http://media.wheeltug.com/ & http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/electric-taxi-puts-show-paris for examples.
This would be powered by the APU, the small jet turbine we use to provide electricity and ventilation at the gate now. So with one of these gear motors installed, the pilots can back out of the gate and taxi to very near the runway before starting the aircraft engines. AND without needing any marshalling ground crew or gate tug, or supertug, or taxibot!! And no need to cycle taxibots or supertugs back to the ramp after each departure.
The fly in that ointment is the electric motors are heavy. And it costs $ to drag that extra poundage along for every minute of the aircraft’s life inflight. So the current thinking is it’ll be a cost saver on airplanes that taxi every couple of hours, e.g. short haul, but not for aircraft that taxi only twice a day, e.g. intercontinental long-haul.
It’ll be interesting to see how these developments shake out. Good bet we’ll see all of these ideas in use with one carrier or another someplace in the years ahead. Overall IMO the Europeans are likely to be the first movers more than US carriers.
"…According to IAI, a standard Boeing 747 expends an average of 1.25 tons of jet fuel in the 17 minutes prior to takeoff. Taxibot, however, cuts this figure to fa mere 25-30 liters per plane.
TaxiBot debuts in Germany. Interesting video from pilot, air controller point of view.
I once flew from Milwaukee to Chicago. We spent more time taxiing in Chicago than we spent in the air.