Flight Arrivals – Checking the flight arrivals is important.
At LAX, for example, there are 4 main runways. It is fully possible for a plan to land on the far northern runway, and to have to circle half the airport to get to its eventual gate. Given the time it takes to cross active runways and roll back to the gate area, the ground ‘taxi time’ could take as much as 20 minutes! Real time flight following information is now possible, not only in the air but also after a plane lands. Forecasting has gotten so good that it is now possible to know when a plane will land, on which runway it will land, and to estimate the amount of time it will take to get to the gate. That means that your Heathrow flight times would include not only landing time, but gate time as well. We can carry this even farther. British Airways flight times can be calculated to include security and passport times, plus the time it takes to walk from the gate to customs, to security, and the time it takes to traverse the airport from Heathrow 1 to Heathrow 4, which are nearly 4 miles apart at the sprawling airport, which is the largest in Europe.
British Airways flight times are amongst the most sophisticated in the flying industry, as they are able, for internal use, to know exactly when the passenger will arrive at the luggage carrousel, and how long it will take for the passenger to get his or her luggage. Flight travel times are getting much easier to predict: it’s no longer a crap-shoot to predict when the plane will land, and how long it will take the passenger to get to the luggage department, and to finally get to his or her car, taxi or bus.
Select your outbound flight time in France at Charles de Gaulle for Paris travel, and you will find no such automation. It is possible to know via Internet when the flight is leaving, but not how long it takes to park your car, get through the ticket line, and get to your gate. Once the plane leaves the gate, there’s no way to tell how long it will take to get to the active runway. Frustrating, isn’t it?