Why airlines make flights longer on purpose
I think the fallacy here is that they can just push back from the gate, trot directly to the runway and takeoff. In any major airport, that&#x27;s a crapshoot.<p>I&#x27;ve been spending a lot of time watching ground ops from<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airportviewer.com&#x2F;airport&#x2F;KSFO" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airportviewer.com&#x2F;airport&#x2F;KSFO</a><p>(courtesy of HN, posted a few months ago). There are times when the planes pile up 14 deep. I saw JFK up to 20 planes on the ground waiting. This is hardly the airlines&#x27; fault.<p>What I dont understand is why they don&#x27;t use wide-body planes more. I mean, I know the standard explanation: they use too much fuel on short-hauls. But why can&#x27;t the manufacturer solve this problem, either by reducing the wing size or changing the shape, to have a wide-body, short-to-medium haul aircraft?<p>Aviation continues to grow, so while I understand the removal of hub-and-spoke, to the distributed pattern, it seems like if there&#x27;s enough customer demand to run N 737&#x27;s&#x2F;A320&#x27;s per day from SFO to, say, DEN, why not run 0.6*N 777&#x27;s instead. Or what if southwest slowly replaced their &#x27;37 fleet with &quot;short range 777s&quot; ?<p>Or,  more specificially, why don&#x27;t they enact regulations at some of our busiest airports and say &quot;Sorry, but at peak hours at JFK, you can only arrive&#x2F;depart wide-body aircraft&quot;. Half the planes that run SFO are these tiny skywest embraer and bombardier jets. During peak times, restricting their use and requiring at least a &#x27;37 or a320 could boost capacity significantly (+100 people per takeoff&#x2F;landing)