Airservices Australia...Flex routes and Sydney curfew
So Airservices Australia publishes "flex" routes daily from various ports to Sydney to optimize fuel burn and take advantage of the most favourable winds, and the same office that generates these routes also runs a program to penalise ("deprioritize")
flights that gain too much advantage of their wonderful "flex tracks" and arrive too far ahead of schedule....
....so what is the point of all of this?
Can flights departing, say Singapore for example, delay their boarding and pushback etc in anticipation of the quicker than average flight time, to try to avoid the penalty at the other end, or does the airport want the gate vacated for the next user....
Kind of defeats the purpose to optimize fuel burn in the cruise only to lose all the benefit in a holding pattern at 20,000 ft for half an hour due too early for curfew or hit with "deprioritization"!