160to4DME,
You are correct in what you say regarding traffic congestion etc. I am sure that a lot of the time, the reason for the slot cancellation is legitimate but not all of the time. If you ever query them as to why you are being denied a start clearance, traffic congestion is invariably the reason given. And this would be acceptable, I guess, if the "rules" were applied fairly and evenly, but they are not. If I were an Iberia, Spanair or a BInter in a similar situation, you can rest assured that I would not be held up. In fact, there would be others who would be held up to make way for the Spanish registered aircraft. As someone who flies into Spain regularly, I can tell you that this has not gone unnoticed but there isn't much we can do unfortunately. It is pretty annoying when on the approach into a Spanish airfield you are told to reduce to minimum clean more than forty or fifty miles back and as you do so, you spot the little BInter ATR72 scooting in underneath you, overtaking from behind, to get in ahead of you. Not exactly good fuel economy when you are in a fully loaded 767 and in this age of high fuel prices it costs companies dearly for this blatant favouritism.
Big Red "L",
The two hour delay I cited earlier is an isolated example, usually delays are not quite as bad as that and it is usually the case that a bad slot is replaced by a better one after some clever flight planning by the company. I do not think anyone is deliberately "profiting" by this sort of delay since the slots are handed out by Eurocontrol in Brussels and have nothing to do with the airfield in question. However, it is interesting to listen to clearance delivery at PMI during the turnaround - just a couple of days ago there were no less than four aircraft all had their slots cancelled and the amount of jockeying around to get new ones was comical. It would have been funny had I not been one of them!
Zeitgebers,
Calling ready 20 minutes before the slot would be a good idea if we ever were ready by that time but it is usually not the case because unfortunately PMI is blessed with some of the worst handling agents around as well (well at least the ones my airline uses unfortunately).
Lazlo
[This message has been edited by Lazlo (edited 06 May 2001).]