Do you know how this can happen?
Delays don't have much to do with traffic density in the vicinity, you don't get an extra lap just because someone is arriving into an airport down the road. What I'm trying to say with the LA comparison is it's all about the runway rate. We can move around 55 per hour on a good day per runway, which is up there with any airport in the world. If the demand is for more than that the delays build up.
The 250nm brick wall is fairly common around the world. Like has been said earlier, places like Heathrow will tell you at top of descent to expect holding. Why didn't they tell you to slow down 15 hours out? The technology doesn't really exist to achieve what you are looking for yet. Airways NZ is the first in the world to operate a combined ground delay / airborne flow manager that they designed them selves. I've seen the system operating, you can scroll through the whole day and look at the sequence of aircraft that haven't departed yet. But like has been said earlier it can only work with what it can see. An aircraft gets airborne three minutes late because the cabin wasn't ready and they had to wait for an aircraft to land in Wellington before they took off, now they can't make their landing time in Auckland and that landing slot is lost forever because everyone was slowed down 15 hours out to make room for them. For this reason they still only pass the RTA to the pilot 40mins from touchdown which would work out to be about 200miles. This game just isn't predictable enough to achieve what you want.
Last edited by 1Charlie; 24th May 2015 at 03:04.