What takes a plane so long to move out of the gate?
A pilot, Lily Roberts answers this question:
“Great question. So what takes a long to push back from the gate? Once we’re finished boarding the airplane? Um, there are a lot of things that are happening. The flight attendants have to go through the cabin and check to make sure that everyone is seated, has their seatbelts on that. All the bags are put away that the cabinets.
They have to give us the thumbs up, the pilots upfront. What we are doing is we are taking our accurate passenger numbers and also our baggage and cargo numbers. We send that information out via our computers. We get what we receive back is our takeoff data that gives us our various takeoff speeds, our flap setting, all of the information that we need to safely depart.
We have to enter that into the computer and then run a few checklists, double-check that everything is good to go. Once the flight crews are ready, we talked to the ground crew, the rampers who push us back, um, and make sure that they’re ready to go. And once we’re all set, then we call ramp control and they have to give us permission to push back from the gate.
And sometimes that we might have to wait for a few minutes if it’s busy or there’s another aircraft behind us, we have to wait for it to clear. Uh, so sometimes all of those things take, um, maybe five minutes. Sometimes it takes longer. Yeah. Depends on what’s going on that day. Hopefully, I answered your question.”