ABSTRACT
In an airport, everything revolves around time. It is the sitting and sauntering time of passengers who are waiting until boarding begins. It is the departure time for the pilot of a Boeing 747-400 bound for New York, whose slot time links its take off to traffic congestion in the upper airways. It is the time that ground engineers need to repair a damaged engine. It is the time needed to load the 90,000 litres of kerosene that a plane burns on a mid-range intercontinental flight. The time used to structure the myriad logistic processes in and around an airport, is Universal Time (UTC), the time of the Greenwich meridian located at longitude 0, and the international standard on which the worldwide system of civil time is based.1 It synchronizes the actions of people located all over the world and, when it takes the form of punctuality, is one of the most valuable qualities an airline can possess.
