“An airplane doesn’t make money sitting on the ground” (airline adage)

“An airplane doesn’t make money sitting on the ground” is an adage of the airline industry. A plane might stop at the JFK or LaGuardia airports, but the sooner it’s back in the air, the sooner it’s making money.
 
“One of the oldest axioms of aviation is that airplanes don’t make any money sitting on the ground” was cited in print in 1951.
       
 
Google Books
Skyways for Business
National Business Aircraft Association
Volume 10
1951
Pg. 47:
One of the oldest axioms of aviation is that airplanes don’t make any money sitting on the ground.
   
Google Books
American Road Builder
Volumes 34-36
1957
Pg. 188:
No aircraft earns money sitting on the ground.
 
Google News Archive
3 January 1963, Windsor (Ontario) Star, pg. 21, col. 1:
Jets cost a great deal of money. They don’t make money sitting on the ground.
 
Google News Archive
18 April 1980, Miami (FL) News, “Is deregulation helping the airlines or the public?” by Larry Birger, pg. 10A, col. 3:
“Airplanes don’t make money sitting on the ground.”
(Russell Ray, senior vice president-marketing for Eastern Airlines—ed.)
 
27 March 1984, Sarasota (FL) Herald-Tribune, “People Express: Price Of An Airline’s Success” by Waldo Proffitt Jr., pg. 10-A, col. 4:
It is not news in the aviation business that airplanes do not make money sitting on the ground. But, People Express has put that maxim to practice with greater than usual disregard for its unhappy side-effects.
 
10 October 1994, San Jose (CA) Mercury News, “Nose to Nose: How United’s shuttle hopes to beat Southwest in no-frills game along ‘California Corridor’”, pg. 1D:
“A plane doesn’t make money sitting on the ground, that’s for damn sure,” said Tim Sieber, director of research for Aviation Systems Research Corp.
 
Airliners.net Discussion Forum
Topic: RE: Turnaround Time
Username: Buff
Posted 2001-09-01 23:16:14 and read 1407 times.
C-3 schedules 1 hour turns on international flights. 40 minutes on stopover flights. 1 hr 30 on customs flights i.e. in bound from Europe - all off, clear customs, all on, continue to final destination.
 
Our philosophy has always been an airplane doesn’t make money sitting at the gate. To the ground handlers:
they tell us how many people are required to turn the airplane in the allotted time. We contract them accordingly.
   
FlyerTalk Forums
A month in the life of an MD-80
LLZ
Mar 18, 02, 12:45 am
(...)
All airlines run about this pace….the plane doesn’t make money on the ground!
 
LiveATC Discussion Forums
Re: KAC A320 engine fail
Whocares
Reply #11 on: July 01, 2007, 03:10:36 PM »
Well, they are new planes, for starters, so failures are pretty rare. The planes fly all day and night, the addage goes “A plane doesn’t make money when its on the ground”
   
Google Books
Do the Right Thing
By James F. Parker
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
2008
Pg. 40:
An airplane doesn’t make money sitting on the ground, and airlines typically require at least 45 minutes to an hour to turn around an airplane between flights. At a typical airline, once the plane touches down on the runway, it takes a leisurely drive (Pg. 41—ed.) to the terminal, where it frequently must wait to be assigned a gate.
   
Airline Weekly (January 7, 2013)
Architects of the Renaissance:
US Airways management helped shape the industry’s turnaround. And they’re not done yet.
(...)
Everyone understood that a key ingredient in Southwest’s remarkable success, even before its massive fuel hedges that now enabled it to run rings around its competitors, was its intensive utilization of assets—an airplane doesn’t make money on the ground, Herb Kelleher had discovered decades earlier.
 
Condé Nast Traveler
What Do Airplanes Do at Night When You’re Asleep?
By Brett Snyder
2:30 PM, FEBRUARY 25 2013
There’s an old saying that an airplane doesn’t make money sitting on the ground. That’s why airlines do everything they can to keep planes in the air on as many as flights as they can. For example, if they can cut the turnaround time between flights throughout the day, then they can probably add an extra flight at the end of that day. But once we get into the late-night hours, things change.