All good things must come to an end, enjoy your last couple of days in the Greek sun! It is apparently 0 degrees outside in Edinburgh atm, last night my dad said his car was reading -7!

Wouldn’t have thought there were many BE Dash 8-400s flying around late on Xmas Eve!

Hey Deano and indeed all other respondents!

It is great to hear about how slots work from a pilot! Accurate info guaranteed!

I just assumed that if FR6622 is scheduled for a 12:05 departure that’s the slot that it will have unless it misses it due to delay then as I have heard on ATC planes can be stung with lengthy delays. Our captain, who was not the usual 20 year old captain that FR are famous for in my books, told us that our slot was 90 mins later than scheduled, and after the groan from all the passengers, he said that in practise there was no way we were going to wait that long as he had put in said “ready message”. Indeed he then said that the slot had been brought forward to 30 mins late!

Also interesting to be corrected on the flexibility of slots I assumed that your earliest airborne was 10 mins before the slot not 5 mins!

Regards

AJ

Except for their long haul services with 200LR’s from LAX.

Again my bad, Wikipedia said that LAX was not a hub or focus city so I thought the DL 777s would all be tied up between ATL and JFK and perhaps even CVG though airliners.net records seem to suggest DL 777s are not frequent visitors to the latter!

Just had a thought! Do V Australia have to operate their aircraft into that particulate gate at LAX? Can they not use another gate that is regularly used by 773s or even A340s if there was a question about how it would fit? they could have even operated the inaugural flight into a bigger gate and then since it was there, they could have towed/taxied her into the other gate! Save what I would guess to be thousands of dollars on an additional flight! What I am surprised at is not that they didn’t measure the space with a tape measure because many things work in theory but not in practice, but that a plane was flown from Australia to LAX (12 hours maybe?) just to fit it into a gate! Must be wrong info! I mean the tape measure answer would not show up any difficulty for a flight deck crew to be able to taxi the plane into the gate if there were airport vehicles servicing other aircraft round about!