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Comment by peterbell_nyc | Hacker News Reader

My wife is on a plane on the ground at ORD (they just landed) and they have been told they can use the restrooms but can't get off the planes. Any reason why folks wouldn't be allowed to deplane at the end of the journey if it was a radar or comms issue? They can pull up to the gate using flags . . .

Is it something else?

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Their gate might be occupied by a flight that can't leave.

Not to mention they won't have enough staff to operate the gate equipment for all gates at once.

This seems like one of those efficiency-vs-resilience problems. Sure, it's "more efficient" (in cost) to use the same empty/fill process for every plane, but when nobody can leave, some extra capacity to unload planes would help.

(i.e. Unloading to tarmac, buses)

You don't have to go to a gate to deplane and this is an extremely rare event. They'll just pull up a staircase and have them deplane to a shuttle eventually.

Most U.S. airports aren't equipped to deplane commercial airliners using stairs, especially at this scale.

You empty the planes at the gates and then push them back to parking (or park them on the runway if needed).

O’Hare is under construction. They’re building an entire new terminal and are operating with a lot less spare capacity while that happens.

We are 6th in line waiting for a gate while they tow grounded planes off of the gates. Normally those flights would have departed and we would get a gate fairly quickly, but if no one is taking off, then they need to move them, and potentially deplane the (angry) departing passengers.

The only time I've spent long stretches on a grounded plane have been at ORD. It's such a busy airport than any disruption to the schedule just causes all sorts of chaos.