Permission to land or take off at a congested airport on a given date and time, or a departure time allocated to manage the flow of air traffic.
What it is
The word has two meanings. An airport slot is the right to use the full infrastructure of a coordinated airport to arrive or depart at a specific time. Slots are allocated by season, summer and winter, and an airline that uses at least 80 per cent of a series keeps it for the following equivalent season; otherwise it is lost. At heavily congested airports such as London Heathrow, slots carry great commercial value and change hands between airlines.
An air traffic flow management slot is something else: a calculated take-off time set by the flow manager, in Europe the Eurocontrol Network Manager, when airspace or the destination airport cannot absorb all flights at once. The aircraft must depart within a narrow window around that time, since waiting on the ground with engines off is more efficient than holding in the air.
Related terms
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This page was last updated on October 9, 2026
APA
Vuelopedia. (2026, October 9). Slot. Retrieved October 18, 2026, from https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot
MLA
“Slot.” Vuelopedia, Fundación Poderia, 9 Oct. 2026, vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot. Accessed 18 Oct. 2026.
Chicago
Vuelopedia. “Slot.” Fundación Poderia. Last modified October 9, 2026. https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot.
Harvard
Vuelopedia (2026) Slot. Available at: https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot (Accessed: 18 October 2026).
BibTeX
@misc{vuelopedia_en_glossary_slot,
author = {{Vuelopedia}},
title = {{Slot}},
publisher = {Fundación Poderia},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-10-09},
url = {https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot},
howpublished = {\url{https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot}},
urldate = {2026-10-18},
note = {Accessed 2026-10-18}
}Wikipedia
{{cite web |url=https://vuelopedia.org/en/glossary/slot |title=Slot |website=Vuelopedia |publisher=Fundación Poderia |date=2026-10-09 |access-date=2026-10-18 |language=en}}