[sokoloff]

While attending a training event, I talked to a pilot who flew cargo for a Tier 1 supplier to North American auto manufacturers. He had several stories of flying a jet with just a handful of boxes on board to avoid the line-down penalties.

My favorite was tower advising them they’d be fined for a departure during local curfew. “Roger, we better get our money’s worth then” and did a max performance takeoff and turn on course with whatever parts they were carrying.

[bombcar]

Heh there are airports that have curfew fines that all the airlines just pay.

[sokoloff]

We have a local field with an 11P-7A curfew (landing/takeoff surcharge technically).

I’m not sure it does much to keep the airport quiet as I’ve been in a holding orbit of three low-altitude airplanes from 6:45 AM to 7:00 with all of us waiting to avoid the curfew fee.

So, instead of slipping relatively quietly into the field from a random route to a straight-in, neighbors got to hear me orbit for three rectangular patterns over the same ground points plus two other airplanes doing the same low-altitude holding. If I were a neighbor, I’d much rather the simple straight-in to be encouraged.

The sports teams all just pay the fee; I never had to break the 11PM side while I was based there, but I would have as well. (It was less than an hour’s worth of gas, so it wouldn’t make sense to divert and reposition later.) I suspect the curfew makes people feel good while making the actual experience worse.

[angry_octet]

The curfew at Sydney is $1M (USD 730K), so large that airlines go to considerable lengths not to violate it, making sure they have accurate forecasts for the winds from LAX and running predictive models for various landing scenarios. They will really burn avgas if they can squeak it in before curfew, and they have been known to divert flights to Canberra or Brisbane and put the passengers into a hotel overnight rather than risk it.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/aviation/environmental/cur...

[ric2b]

But those extra 15 min in the air cost money, so it's still an incentive to not plan on arriving before the curfew ends.

[DavidSJ]

Sometimes those curfew fines actually cause flights not to depart. Some years ago, I was sitting on the tarmac at John Wayne for about an hour, hoping to make it just under the nighttime curfew, but ultimately the flight was canceled and I had to get a shuttle to LAX and an alternative flight in the morning.

[bombcar]

John Wayne is more forceful than some for sure. I flew a small plane their once and took off just at curfew - the runway lights went off the moment my wheels left the ground.

[sokoloff]

If they turned off before you passed the departure end, I’d raise that as safety concern (ASRS at a minimum, but this is something that I’d probably take straight to the FSDO).

[toast0]

It's been a while, but flying into Long Beach from a connection in Phoenix, the scheduled plane was delayed somewhere, they had boarded us on a replacement and then realized the plane was too loud, so they rushed us to a different plane (in the next terminal) that had the right noise reduction equipment.

Also, my Dad once had a late-ish flight to Long Beach that got diverted to LAX because delays pushed it past the curfew.

[listenallyall]

...and Long Beach's stubbornness about that curfew and other things is a big part of the reason JetBlue packed up and moved all its operations to LAX

https://crankyflier.com/2020/10/08/jetblues-two-decade-run-i...