[rattlsnak]

Penalty box is an out of the way place you can pull over out of everybodies way so that you can wait for your sequence to take off. If you ask to go there, you probably have a mechanical problem you need to work out before you can take off, or return to the gate.

An example would be if you have 20 planes waiting to take off, and just out of luck the first three planes are all going to New York. But New York has bad weather so instrument approaches are being conducted, meaning that each plane going in there now has to be a little further apart. ATC will call for '20 miles in trail' going to N.Y. from all departure airports. So now those three airplanes have to be spaced out, and instead of having everybody behind them wait, they tell them to go to the 'penalty box' to wait for their time to take off, and the line moves up behind them.

Heavy refers to weights and is used for wake turbulence seperation. And 757 are considered heavies as far as wake is concerned even though they dont use that as part of their callsign.

The new A380 is going to be a "super heavy" and require 10-15 miles of seperation. ( FAA has not ruled yet)