How are departure gates dertmined/How are connecting gates determined?

[flyguyMN]

How are departue gates determined?: For example, here in MSY if you fly NWA to MSP you are most likely to leave out of gate A-1 or A-3.

When you arrrive in MSP you are more than likely to come into gate C-12 - C-21.

Then how are connection gates determined?: For example once in MSP you come in to gate C-20 yet your connection to lets say DLH is out of gate D-1

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I have arrived from DLH to MSP into gate D-1 yet my connection gate to MSY was G-4 Yet another time I flew from DLH to MSP I came into gate C-12 and my connection to MSY left out of C-22? Why such a drastic shift. These times were only a month apart.

 

[Resume Writer]

You are asking the mysterious question that defies logic!

I know when I worked for the airline we had "standard" gates - the same flights left out of the same gates on a daily basis. It is much easier on the operation to have this system. What can change the "standard" gates? Mechanicals or weather delays on other aircraft, late inbound aircraft with a large number of people connecting to one particular flight, etc.

When the standard gates are messed up because of any of the situations mentioned above, they look at the next inbound arriving aircraft scheduled to be at that gate, what the timing of the delay is, etc., and then look at the rest of the gates to determine where there are openings. As you can probably imagine, any delay can mess up the whole operation.

The connection gates really do not have any logic in my opinion.

Perhaps there is someone on here that works operations that can explain it better.

 

[minitour]

See...what they do is find out what flight you're connecting to and then park your aircraft at the gate the farthest away from your connecting gate, thus assuring you break a sweat as you're running down the tunnel only to find some fat lady that hasn't bathed in a month and has cheese stuck under her fourth chin has spilled over into your seat for this wonderful turbulent flight where the kid sitting behind you won't quit kicking your seat as they just ran out of your drink of choice and now you're driving home in 3' of snow rather than 86 degrees and sunny....


It's that easy!

-mini

 

[Av8rPHX]

Resume Writer pretty much hit it head on... they try to schedule certain city pairs at the same gates for ease of operation. I know for us in PHX (HPEx) our TUS flights are 99% of the time scheduled out of B3, and our International jet departures (PVR,GDL,SJD,MZT) all leave from B19 or B20. I commute to MSP and I can almost always count on the 3pm PHXMSP flight (HP753) to be at gate A1. I dont think there is any real rhyme or reason to how its done.

 

[Resume Writer]

There was one thing I forgot to mention - which is probably common sense. Certain aircraft, depending upon the airport, can only fit in certain gates. At least that is how it was in PHX before they built the addition of the high A gates, which I believe are A-17 through A-26. Before that, they could only park the B-757 at the end of the A or B concourse, which were gates 11 - 14 on each concourse.

I remember the concourse at LAX was the same way - the B-757 could only park at a couple of gates at the end of Terminal 1 when it would fly in there.

So, that may have something to do with it at other airports as well. Those are the only two examples I can think of that stand out in my mind.

 

[smellthejeta]

When I worked for ACA at IAD, we had our gates/flight schedules set for the month. Every flight to the same city left from the exact same gate for the whole month. Made it real easy for baggage transfers.

When I worked for ACA at ORD, the operational reliability was so ppor, that the "daily gate/flight schedule" was NEVER adhered to and flights were always being moved from gate to gate.

 

[retired guy]

I flew for a major airline for almost 30 years and never figured out how gates were assigned.