# Aircraft Turnaround The atomic unit of airport operations. A turnaround is everything that happens to an aircraft between landing and next takeoff: passengers off, baggage off, cleaning, catering, refueling, maintenance checks, passengers on, baggage on, pushback. Typical narrow-body turnaround: 30-45 minutes. Wide-body: 60-90+ minutes. The turnaround is a precedence-constrained scheduling problem. Some tasks are sequential (passengers off before cleaning), some are parallel (refueling can happen during cleaning), and some have complex dependencies that vary by airline, aircraft type, and airport. The turnaround is where delays are born or absorbed. A 10-minute delay on deboarding cascades through every downstream task. The buffer between scheduled and minimum turnaround time is where airports and airlines make their money or lose it. Ground handlers execute the turnaround. Airlines set the requirements. Airport authorities provide the infrastructure. ATC controls the airspace. Each stakeholder optimizes their own slice. Nobody optimizes the whole thing. This is the core problem that [[Airport Collaborative Decision Making]] tries to solve. Three phases: arrival operations (deboarding, unloading), dwell period (cleaning, catering, refueling, maintenance), departure operations (boarding, loading, pushback). If the dwell period is long enough, the aircraft may be towed to a remote stand to free up a contact gate. See [[Stand and Gate Allocation]]. Related: [[Stand and Gate Allocation]], [[Ground Support Equipment Scheduling]], [[Airport Operations MOC]], [[Disruption Management in Airport Operations]] --- Tags: #deeptech #firstprinciple