ok, I think this has been asked before, but, have to ask it again.
Is the flight departure time from "the gate you board at" or from the "end of the run way you take off from"?
I claim the runway answer, but that's me. Your answer?
Airline Departure times
It's definitely not take-off.
Departure time is the time the plane begins to push back from the gate. Arrival time is when it arrives at the gate and engines switch off.
When the plane starts its journey, ie pushback.
"Airline Departure times..."
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For me, it is the time I should be on the plane!
For the airline, pilots and most of the time everyone it is when the doors close and the plane starts moving away from the gate. The pilots don't go 'on the clock' until the plane starts moving and so all the pre-flight stuff unpaid time, and whether the flight leaves 'on time' or not is counted from that point. That's important because pilots have very strict rules about how long they can work at any one stretch of time. So the schedulers count as short an amount of time as possible.
I was on a flight once where take-off was delayed 4 hours by thunderstorms and they made us move off the gate because they needed it for another plane. Not sure how they counted that. We were late leaving the gate but not That late.
I was in the US once when thunderstorms stopped departures. We'd already boarded and the doors were closed. Eventually the pilot said we had to deplane. We did and waited about 40 minutes before we re-boarded. The cabin crew were furious because we hadn't begun to push back so they wouldn't get paid for the extra time spent during the delay. It was a US airline.
[ Edit: Edited on 5 May 2025, 12:03 GMT by leics2 ]
that was probably because there are now rules about how long you can keep passengers on an airplane that is on the ground - when the toilets run out of TP etc. Back in 2007 when it happened to us there weren't any such rules.