keep a slot warm
v. phr.— «An airline is flying an empty passenger jet between Heathrow and Cardiff on a daily basis—just so that it can hold on to its lucrative slots at the London airport.…The flights reveal the lengths to which airlines will go to hang on to runway slots. A slot is the right to use a runway for a take-off or a landing at a given time of the day. The practice is known in the airline industry as “keeping slots warm.”» —“Heathrow’s ‘ghost’ flights” in London, England The Australian (Sydney, Australia) Mar. 12, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Joan from Buffalo, New York, wants to know how to spell a particular word that means to spiff up, clean up, straighten, or fix. The word is zhuzh, which has had dozens of different spellings over the years because it’s primarily transmitted...
The word nurdle, sometimes spelled nerdle, can be used to denote various “small bits of things,” such as styrofoam packing material or detritus in one’s pockets. It may be related to the word nodule. Like thingamabob and whatsit...