{"id":861,"date":"2026-02-06T11:32:45","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/?p=861"},"modified":"2026-02-06T11:32:45","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:32:45","slug":"runways-and-reservations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/?p=861","title":{"rendered":"Runways and reservations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got a good question about runways and reservations today, specifically about why I&#8217;m saying that a flight can only have one runway reserved at a time. Here&#8217;s my justification.<\/p>\n<p>Admittedly I&#8217;m making up stuff about runways here, since I&#8217;m not in the airline industry. But my idea was as follows: only one aircraft can reserve a specific runway at a time; otherwise there would be a collision when two airplanes tried to simultaneously land\/takeoff. If there&#8217;s heavy traffic at the airport, it&#8217;s possible for several airborne flights to be &#8220;queued up&#8221; (not represented in the database) waiting to be given the reservation to land, but only one would have the reservation at any given time. Same thing for departures &#8212; there can be lots of airplanes waiting on the tarmac full of passengers and ready to take off, but who have to wait their turn to get a runway reservation so they can do so.<\/p>\n<p>As for why a flight can&#8217;t reserve multiple runways, my assumption is that runway reservations are a pretty quick thing (on the order of minutes for waiting for one, and then using it and getting off the runway so other flights can use it) and therefore a flight wouldn&#8217;t &#8220;reserve in advance&#8221; a runway at its destination airport that it&#8217;s not even going to reach for several hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got a good question about runways and reservations today, specifically about why I&#8217;m saying that a flight can only have one runway reserved at a time. Here&#8217;s my justification. Admittedly I&#8217;m making up stuff about runways here, since I&#8217;m not in the airline industry. But my idea was as follows: only one aircraft can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":862,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephendavies.org\/cpsc350\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}