American Shifts for Smoother Schedules at DFW

When every hour has a bank of departing flights is an airport really still running with a banked schedule?

DFW operates nine departure banks today, covering departures from 5a to 11p. Starting next spring the carrier will shift to 13 departure banks across the same timeframe.

A traveler today might connect at DFW, arriving in a wave that touches down just after 9a. Assuming everything goes well, they pass in and out of the terminal in under an hour. It is a massive flow of people, and it usually mostly works. But it is not easy, nor is recovery when something goes awry.

The old schedule has a mind-boggling 110 departures scheduled in the 9am hour and a similar number of arrivals. That drops to 52 in the new plan. At the same time, previously underutilized hours (11a, 1p, 3p, 5p, 9p) with fewer than a dozen scheduled departures will now each see more than 40 flights under the new schedule.

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