old, not bold,
Which comes back to my contention that devising a much more co-ordinated European ATM system would pay dividends in every way for efficiency, costs, emissions and time keeping. If the ATM system worked more as a whole, rather than a set of different national systems, 'going round and round in the hold ' as you say, waiting to land could be very much reduced. Heathrow uses holding to maximise runway throughput, but it could also be done by a Europe-wide metering system to adjust arrivel times with far less holding.
BUT, this needs Europe-wide co-operation, and politicians are not very good at that unfortunately.