The Most Frustrating Part of Flying, Explained

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:02]At 5:15 p.m., my flight from Philadelphia to Chicago O'Hare touched down. We cleared the runway, started taxiing in, and we had what I thought was a 20-minute trip to the gate.

[00:00:11]Unfortunately for me, it did not take 20 minutes. And I'm going to use that miserable experience to explain why taxi times can get so out of hand. The first problem for me was distance. I'd landed on runway 27 right up on the far north side of the field, while my gate sat in terminal 1 down in O'Hare's central core. A commonly used taxi route from 27 right down to terminal 1 follows this path and measures roughly 5 1/2 m across the airfield. So even putting everything else to the side, the distance alone translates to a solid 15 to 20 minute taxi. On this specific day, ground control initially assigned my plane to this sequence. And I'm not going to try and repeat the ATC callouts verbatim, but it's basically a routed path using the taxiway identifiers from the official airport diagram, plus any hold short instructions along the way.

[00:00:59]Showing the map like this is misleading because O'Hare usually looks more like this.

[00:01:06]It really gives you an appreciation for what air traffic control has to deal with. Controllers are not just picking the shortest path from runway to gate.

[00:01:14]They're picking a route that works inside the traffic picture they have at that moment. That can mean avoiding a congested crossing, keeping aircraft out of a backup near the terminal, fitting arrivals around departures, or one of so many other possibilities. Our first pause came at the next taxiway intersection where ground control was metering aircraft into the flow. We held position on ATC's instructions and waited for the traffic already established on that taxi way to clear before joining it. The FAA sets runway direction primarily by the wind. And because winds at O'Hare often blow from the west, arrivals land to the west.

[00:01:48]With five planes ahead of us, our progress depended on two things. ATC finding a usable crossing window and the aircraft ahead of us getting through that window before it closed. Even though we were already on the ground, our route to the gate still had to cross this active runway, which meant everything came down to the spacing between arriving aircraft. ATC is the one that issues the crossing clearance.

[00:02:08]But at many large airports, there's also a built-in safety layer known as runway entrance lights. You've probably seen them before, but when they turn red, they're telling pilots not to cross, even if the runway appears open for a moment. Controllers are not allowed to keep squeezing planes through just because the line's getting long. If the crossing does not fit safely before the next arrival reaches the threshold, everybody waits. About 20 minutes later, my plane was finally through. The next runway, 27 left, was handling departures. It had a pretty griml looking queue of its own, but it didn't hold us up. O'Hare, like many other major hubs, doesn't handle traffic in a smooth, even flow. It handles it in banks. Arrivals stack up, departures stack up, and for a while, these two waves overlap. So, even though the queue for 27 left didn't directly delay my aircraft, it still showed I landed in one of the worst possible windows. As we crossed over Interstate 190, that's where the story really started to get interesting. A bit over 35 minutes had already passed and we were just getting started. O'Hare is under an incredible amount of construction. Like to put it on the map, these are the areas under construction and there's a good chance I'm still missing some. Most of this work is for OD Next, a multi-year terminal and airfield modernization project, but I'll save the details for a future video on my other channel, Buildcore. Anyways, construction only affected my route because it forced my plane onto a slightly different path.

[00:03:33]That added time since we had to wait for the other aircraft to pass through the constrained area first. Then came some bad news. The pilot announced our assigned gate was occupied and we were sent to the penalty box. A penalty box is a holding pad away from the gates where aircraft can wait without blocking taxiways or tying up the ramp. Once an arrival gets too close to the terminal, one airplane with nowhere to go can start causing problems for everyone behind it. So, the point of the penalty box is to put the delay in the least disruptive place possible. Here at O'Hare, this specific block of concrete that we were sent to isn't officially called that. It's actually the deicing pad. But in popular times, it's routinely used to hold aircraft. As we sat in the pad, I and probably most of the others aboard couldn't help but wonder what was happening at our gate.

[00:04:20]Apparently, there was a lastminute maintenance issue during departure prep.

[00:04:23]Minor enough not to cancel the flight, but serious enough, the crew couldn't push until maintenance signed off and the ground crew ran a few extra checks.

[00:04:31]Even after it was fixed, that aircraft didn't push back immediately. It had already lost its spot in the departure sequence, and ATC had to slot it back in among the outbound traffic, which meant more waiting for us. We finally inched forward once their aircraft pushed out, made a quick taxi to the terminal area and then to the gate and parked a moment later about 2 and 1/2 hours after touching down. While I may have been slightly off of some of the timing, the overall story almost perfectly parallels my real experience. And I bet a lot of people watching have dealt with taxi delays that were much worse. O'Hare is infamous for this, but it's really not the exception. A 2025 study using FAA data found that large US hubs averaged about 27 minutes of total taxi time, while medium and small hubs were both closer to 20. And the airports at the top of the list were places like JFK at 37.6 minutes, Newark at 35, LaGuardia at 31.3, and Dallas Fort Worth at 30.7.

[00:05:28]It's important to note though that those are total taxi times, whereas with O'Hare, we've been mainly focused on taxi in time. And just because I want to mention it, internationally, the primary airports at London, Paris, and Amsterdam are all commonly associated with these longer taxi times. My example covered a lot of the common reasons why taxi delays happen, but there are plenty of others. One of the biggest, especially in winter, is deicing. It affects mostly departures, but it can slow the whole airport down. At O'Hare, aircraft are often sent to the central deicing facility, the same area my plane was being held at, which helps free up gates, but adds another step. Taxi delays can also come from low visibility, bad weather and lightning, runway changes, disabled aircraft, blocked alleys, equipment issues, radio congestion, and plenty more. And if you've ever wondered why, like in my example, my plane couldn't just pull into another open gate, the answer is that open doesn't always mean available.

[00:06:23]Gate assignment is another real operational problem with limited tightly scheduled resources or it may not work cleanly for that aircraft in operation.

[00:06:31]That's why airlines and airports often protect the broader gate plan instead of making one quick swap that could create bigger problems later. Taxi delays feel worse than airborne delays because mentally most people count the flight as over the second the wheels touch down.

[00:06:45]Up in the air, even if you're circling or waiting, it still feels like you're in the travel part of the trip. But once you land, everything changes. To summarize, taxi delay is often a symptom of surface network saturation, where arrival flow, departure flow, gate readiness, ramp access, and local procedures all interact. To me, it makes big airports so interesting. They're constantly managing all of these conflicts. So, the next time your flight lands and takes forever to reach the gate, it is worth remembering that the problem may not be your plane at all. It may just be that the surface network around it has run out of room to breathe. I asked for some of your worst taxiing experiences, and I really appreciate everyone who shared them. For anyone who didn't take part, feel free to leave yours in the comments below.

[00:07:28]And even though I put a lot of time into researching this video and filming parts of it, there's always a chance I missed something. So, if I did, please let me know in the comments. I'm Josh. This is Airore. Thanks for watching.