Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Planning to fly? Plan to wait, too

Pack some extra patience in your carry-on. It could be a while.

By STEVE HUETTEL, Times Staff Writer
Published July 20, 2007

Flying from Philadelphia to Tampa last month, your odds of arriving on time were just slightly better than 50-50.

Seven out of 10 flights from Detroit ran on schedule. But pick the wrong one and you really got burned: the average delay in the Motor City was 5 1/2 hours.

Everyone has a story or knows somebody with a tale about a hideously late trip or getting stuck at the airport when a flight was canceled.

Headline writers dub it the "Summer from Hell." As experts predicted well before Memorial Day, airlines have repeatedly buckled under the weight of heavy seasonal traffic loads.

The summer's first operating numbers came out this week from FlightStats.com, a cool flight-tracking service that compiles data from airlines, the government and airports. It wasn't pretty.

Forty U.S. airlines canceled 20,301 flights in June, more than twice as many as the same month last year. More than 30 percent of flights ran late, 15 minutes or more after their scheduled arrival time, compared with 25 percent in June 2006.

Nearly one in eight flights was "excessively late," more than 45 minutes behind schedule, from June 1 through July 15.

Airlines did a little better than average flying into Tampa International Airport.

Flights from busy airline hubs got poor marks in June for on-time performance. They included Dallas-Fort Worth International 54.8 percent, battered by thunderstorms that tied American Airlines in knots.

Planes coming from other Florida airports were the most frequently canceled: Fort Myers (12.4 percent), Tallahassee (7.7 percent) and Miami (7 percent).

What's behind all the poor performance?

Storms play a big part, along with more planes flying packed with more passengers. After that, it depends on whom you ask.

Airlines point to an outdated air traffic control system based on radar that can't handle enough planes.

They're lobbying for a modern satellite-based system that would cost the Federal Aviation Administration $15-billion to $22-billion, according to the Air Transport Association, the trade group for major airlines.

The current system "has reached its limit and can't handle the high volume of traffic on a good day - and that's exacerbated when we have bad weather," says ATA spokesman David Castelveter.

But the airlines crowd the skies by scheduling more flights into already congested areas like the Northeast. Carriers have replaced big jets with regional jets that fly as few as 50 seats but take up as much airspace in the air traffic system.

The FAA should make overloaded airports limit flights, says Joe Brancatelli, a columnist and editor of JoeSentMe.com, a business travel Web site.

"It's like putting six pounds of sugar into a five-pound bag, and the airlines want to blame the bag," he says.

Airline labor groups say carriers cut staff so deeply during bankruptcies that there's no give in the system.

In the summer, airlines schedule flight crews close to their FAA-mandated time limits despite the risk of running short, says Wade Blaufuss, spokesman for the Northwest Airlines Pilots Association.

"When there's a hiccup like weather or a (pilot) fatigue problem, it can cause a cascading train wreck," he says.

Information from the Wall Street Journal was used in this report. Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3384.

You'll get there -- eventually
Excessive delays. Long waits. Canceled flights. It's been a tough summer nationwide, and it hasn't been much better here. Here's how airlines did flying into Tampa International Airport last month. On average, 73.8 percent of inbound flights were on time.

* Ranks airports with at least 30 flights in June into TIA. Source: FlightStats.com

Delays, cancellations rise
Compared with last year, U.S. airlines' performance has been dismal. Why? Some say storms. Others point to an outdated traffic control system. Labor groups blame carriers' staff cuts.

* Includes June and first two weeks of July

** More than 45 minutes late. On-time flights are defined as arriving less than 15 minutes after the scheduled time.

Source: FlightStats.com

[Last modified July 19, 2007, 23:35:18]