Why GPU Connection Shows Up Late on Morning Banks
Morning turnaround charts often blame catering or cleaning, but at three airports we visited this spring the GPU hook-up interval was the hidden stretch.
When duty managers ask why the 07:00 bank runs long, the first suspect is usually passenger boarding or cabin cleaning. Our field notes from March through May at three regional airports tell a different story on contact stands without fixed GPU bridges.
We timed 142 turnarounds where the GPU cart approached from a shared pool rather than a stand-mounted unit. Median connection time was 11 minutes from chocks-in — four minutes longer than the airport's internal target. The delay clustered in two causes: cart positioning blocked by the catering truck lane, and radio confirmation waiting while the ramp supervisor managed two adjacent pushbacks.
Charting this interval separately from "ground power available" in movement logs matters because many A-CDM exports collapse those timestamps. When we split them, airport directors could see that buying one additional GPU cart for the morning bank would cost less than adding a ramp supervisor shift — a decision that only becomes visible when the interval has its own line on the chart.
If you are preparing a winter schedule, pull your GPU connection interval as its own column before you assume boarding is the bottleneck.