Interesting situation. I didn't know that was the rule, actually.
It brings to mind a serious policy suggestion, vaguely-related here: Has anybody considered barring planes from pulling away from the gate until they have an expected takeoff time within, say, half an hour or 45 minutes, in addition to this? Doing so might actually force a bit of responsibility on the airports in terms of slotting (which seems to be a good deal of the problem with some of these situations).
That is mostly what is done anyway, since no airline in its right mind wants to just for fun run their planes around the airport. One of the unintended consequences of this sort of a rule will be that arriving flights will have to sit out on tarmac because you are now not allowed to move departing flights out of gates since say for temporary local weather reasons you do not have an exact slot, even though you have a sequence and you have flow control clearance and know that you will get a slot as soon as the thunderstorm on the departure vector moves on. So suppose a ground hold happens after you leave the gate with a slot, what then? Do you have to rush back to a gate, which may not be available anymore?
Oh please please don't make more ill considered rules! That will pretty much cause departing flights to be delayed way more than they are now, and arriving flight to not get arrival gates as soon as they can now. Each time you reduce flexibility of operations by ill considered rules like this ultimately a larger group of passengers suffer. Don't get me wrong, I am all for controlling egregious behavior of airlines, but blanket rules that reduce flexibility of operations is not the right way to achieve that.
I know you want to create advantage for rail even though such service is mostly unavailable to people. But please do not screw the airline passengers in the process, the government is quite capable of doing that without further help from you
. And this is coming from someone who does a lot of flying like over 100k miles each year. I do not want to see people who seldom fly to take it upon themselves to cause more problems for the likes of me.
OK, I guess now I should duck ready to get lynched by the railroad crazies around here
:help: