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Originally Posted by Acey
To me the effectiveness of call to gate will be the assign times, and they have full control over that. Like WestJet transborders are getting posted 75 minutes prior... that seems like too much, especially for a -700 with only 130 pax. AS/DL/UA times seem to be 45-50 min prior (though yyc.com is advertising at least 60 min for every flight). Rouge is doing 120 minutes.
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Westjet's main trans border and international departure bank is 10-11am with 6-8 mainline departures. Typically there are 1-3 last minute gate swaps that are communicated at the 1.5 hour mark. By 1.5 hours before departure, the majority of WS pax have all ready checked in, so their printed boarding passes have the wrong gate listed. Take my August family vacation to SAN, I got gate assignment for B21 the night before, on check-in it was B21, by the time we reached security the gate changed to B38 due to a tail swap with the LAS flight that was also an 800. I would have gladly taken the call to gate rather than have get the family to gate 21 only have to go back to the security area and continue onto gate 38. As it was my iPhone gave me the revised gate assignment while we were at security, so I saved myself the hassle of having to withstand the wife's verbal berating for having gone to the wrong gate.
Ideally, Call to gate would work best if the airport took control of their FIDS and posted please wait until 50 minutes prior to departure for all narrowbody aircraft and 90 minutes prior to departure for all widebody aircraft.
It is not necessary to force the airlines to keep gate assignments a secret. Under the gate swap scenario, the airline has to deal with communicating the gate swaps to its passengers. Under the new call to gate system, the airport can and should ban Westjet from making whole terminal announcements for gate swaps. There is a reason why I am picking on WS here, every other airline at YYC has a better system for confirming gate swaps than WS to the point where there is only one airline that is dependent upon whole terminal announcements for gate swaps and final calls.
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Ideally, these times would be tweaked based on loads and departure times of adjacent gates, such that the number of people in the holdroom and at a given gate pair could be effectively modulated. Cage, is this feasible?
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Your plan is feasible for every airline except WS. WS problem is that they want 6 transborder departures in space of 20 minutes. There is a process bottleneck at the gate area as a single walkway is used to get passengers to two bridge heads. You cannot dual load gates 72 and 73 without causing passenger confusion and pax getting onto the wrong aircraft. Launching six aircraft in 20 minutes would require one aircraft on all six gate nodes. Alternately the departure bank would have to be split into separate two groups that are atleast 30 minutes apart.
UA, AC, and DL can all do dual departures from the same node as their departures are more spread out and they are using large regional aircraft with half the seats as a WS 738.
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