That's a strange observation. I would think an economist of all people would know that the negative utility of missing a plane is huge compared to that of spending a little unnecessary time at the airport. I'm rarely doing anything productive with the time prior to the airport arrival on "travel days" anyway.
It's an analogy for understanding the idea of fair value. If you want to spend a "fair" amount of time at the airport, it means that you need to balance the utility of missing one plane against the utility of always spend a lot of time at the airport in order to never miss a plane.
If you take 1000 planes in your life, and spend an extra 1 hour per plane in order to be sure that you will be on time, that's 1000 hours in your life. If, instead, you cut down that hour to 30 minutes, and that makes you miss 3 planes in your life, you'd still have "earned" 500 hours, while losing 3 planes. It's a better trade off overall.
But yeah, just an analogy, I bet the guy never missed a plane...
