United Continental tries a little leniency for passengers running late for the flight

Bloomberg

It’s the airport equivalent of road rage: You race to your gate on a tight connection to see the door shut and your plane inching backwards.
One reason gate agents are so strict about that closed door is an airline metric called “D-0” (D-zero), which designates a flight that departs at exactly the scheduled time. The industry—and government regulators—rigorously monitor this metric to see which carriers operate reliably and which don’t.
Aiming to alleviate at least some of this pain, United Continental Holdings Inc. is testing a program called “Dynamic D-0” at its Denver hub to empower gate agents to delay a departure to accommodate customers and employees rushing to a connecting flight. The system “tells an employee, tells customers, ‘Hey, here’s five or six customers that are coming to this connection; they’re going to be five minutes late, but we know we can make up the time in flight on this particular flight,’” United President Scott Kirby said on Tuesday at an investor conference. “Sometimes we can’t, and we don’t hold the airplane.”
Typically, about a quarter of United’s flights arrive 10 or more minutes early, meaning they can make up a slight departure delay in transit. The new software examines flights in this group and coordinates data with United’s connecting passenger roster as a way to decide which departures can be allowed to slip. United’s operations center then identifies the flights to hold and alerts gate agents. The testing has saved thousands of connecting passengers from missing a flight, Kirby said. The new system’s flight holds are likely to have “minimal impact on performance as the flights are expected to arrive on-time, even with the hold,” United spokeswoman Erin Benson said. United will expand the automation to other large airports later this year, and eventually use it on all of its flights, mainline and regional, worldwide.
Punctual departures have become far more critical as US airlines work to boost schedule reliability, an attribute that such carriers as Delta Air Lines and Spirit Airlines have touted as a way to win customers.