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Comment by hoag | Hacker News Reader

It's about freaking time. I remember back in May 2009 I was on a UA flight from HNL-SFO and if I'm not mistaken, they were testing SFO's GPS approach system: IIRC, we descended from cruising altitude to wheels down in about 10 minutes. Awesome.

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That's quite a common time (10-13 minutes) from cruising altitude to landing at most airports in East Asia. America has other issues that interfere with more sensible landing procedures that need to be addressed, but are unlike to be.

This is very interesting, if you have a few minutes, can you please explain briefly why this is the case to someone who doesn't know much about aviation?

From what I understand, its mostly due to the landing approaches being more straight forward, the lack of stacking of planes to land (less circling) and timing between planes is usually slightly longer than in the US.

An extra ten or twenty seconds between planes taking off and landing can have a large impact over the course of a day. In the US the majority of flight delays are in the late-afternoon and into the evening because of the knock-on effect of delays (at that airport or others) and the lack of spare capacity within the timings to adjust the scheduling of takeoffs and landings.

That's interesting. I didn't know that. I would assume, therefore, that domestic operators in East Asian countries tend to average at least slightly better fuel economy? Would be interesting to see some numbers on this. A 10-13 min descent is a huge improvement over the 20-25 min descent commonly used today elsewhere.

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