Even if you’re not a frequent flyer, I’m sure at one point or another you’ve faced the panic that comes with cutting the check-in time on your flight rather fine.

The traffic slowed to a standstill, your lift fell through, you jolled too hard and getting out of bed was traumatic – whatever the reason, you still reckon the airline will let you on if the plane hasn’t taken off yet.

Wrong, because even if you can see your plane sitting on the tarmac you probably aren’t going to be on board when it takes to the air.

FlySafair spoke to BusinessTech about why this is, and broke it down into three main areas:

Safety:

“While we focus a lot on the technical aspects of aircraft safety, people often overlook that we also have a responsibility to ensure that nobody’s safety is compromised in terms of who, or what, we allow on board our aircraft,” says FlySafair Flight Safety Manager, Johan Schoeman.

Individuals who seek to compromise the safety of passengers aboard an aircraft will often take the approach of rushing on board at the last minute, hoping that their haste not to miss the flight will mean a lighter application of security screening protocols to both people and luggage…

Flight Planning:

Flight planning is no small task. There are a great number of factors to consider when planning a flight. Pilots and flight engineers have to factor the weather, the distances they will travel, what alternate airports they will plan to land at should they need to divert and a great number of other factors.

What goes on behind the scenes is a complicated preparation and two very important things need to be known before this planning can be done: How many passengers and bags we will have aboard (for the weight calculation) and how that weight will be spread across the aircraft.

Once these factors are known, the engineers and the flight deck have 40 minutes to make all of these important calculations, which have to be officially filed in the flight report, a legal document, so that we can be assured that the flight was planned and operated safely and responsibly.

Not only is 40 minutes not a long time to make these calculations, but certain aspects of the aircraft preparation also depend on these inputs, like for example, where the luggage will be packed to evenly distribute the weight in the aircraft.

Adding in late passengers will mean that these calculations and processes will have to be started again from scratch, which will almost certainly result in a delay. Not updating these calculations and just “squeezing someone in” is not an option either, as this is illegal and irresponsible.

Delays:

Having a flight delayed by a late passenger will not only inconvenience the 189 passengers on the aircraft who boarded in time, it could also ultimately inconvenience all other passengers on flights operated by that particular aircraft for the rest of the day.

On an average day up to 50 aircraft depart from OR Tambo every hour.

Take off slots are very carefully planned – if we miss one, we have to join the queue, which means that a 5 minute delay can become much longer very quickly. If this knocks on through-out the schedule for the rest of the day, the full schedule will be disrupted.

The long and the short of it? You being late impacts more people than you care to imagine, so try not to be that guy or girl.

You want the bit that’s going to sting? Sorry, you’re just not that important.

[source:businesstech]