United wants to make it easier to reach your connection

It’s the airport equivalent of road rage: You race to your gate on a tight connection to see the door shut and your plane inching backwards. One reason gate agents are so strict about that closed door is an airline metric called “D-0” (D-zero), which designates a flight that departs at exactly the scheduled time. The industry—and government regulators—rigorously monitor this metric to see which carriers operate reliably and which don’t. Aiming to alleviate at least some of this pain, United Continental Holdings Inc. is testing a program called “Dynamic D-0” at its Denver hub to empower gate agents to delay a departure to accommodate customers and employees rushing to a connecting flight. The system “tells an employee, tells customers, ‘Hey, here’s five or six customers that are coming to this connection; they’re going to be five minutes late, but we know we can make up the time in flight on this particular flight,’” United President Scott Kirby said Tuesday at an investor conference. “Sometimes we can’t, and we don’t hold the airplane.” Typically, about a quarter of United’s flights arrive 10 or more minutes early, meaning they can make up a slight departure delay in transit. The new software examines flights in this group and coordinates the data with United’s connecting passenger roster as a way to decide which departures can be allowed to slip. United’s operations center then identifies the flights to hold and alerts gate agents. The testing has saved thousands of connecting passengers from missing a flight, Kirby said. Story has more detail.<br/>