If you thought airline travel could not get any bumpier, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to get worse.
Why? Count the ways:
• With an economic recovery underway, airline delays will be more common, according to a Brookings Institution report. Researchers say much of the problem is due to heavy concentrations of short trips between big cities.
• The air traffic control system is “ill-equipped” to deal with future travel, the study found.
• According to Brookings, 10.1 percent of all flights now arrive at least two hours late, up from 4.3 percent in 1990. The average delay is nearly an hour, 41 minutes longer than in 1990.
The researchers found New York to be the worst metro area in the country for late flights, something that has been evident in monthly on-time reports from the US Transportation Department. About 30 percent of arrivals and 22 percent of departures in New York are late.
The Brookings researchers found most delays concentrated in 26 cities — especially New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta and San Francisco. Large cities with the best on-time performance were Salt Lake City, Honolulu and San Jose, Calif.
On-time performance has improved lately because airlines have cut flights during the recession. But as the economy recovers, so will air travel — meaning more delays according to Adie Tomer, co-author of the report.
“We’re not trying to point fingers at the airlines. There are a lot of people flying and we simply don’t have the capacity to handle them,” he said.
He blamed congestion on big airlines’ reliance on hub-and-spoke networks that push more flights into crowded hub airports, and on the growing number of short flights between big cities such as New York-Boston, New York-Washington and Los Angeles-San Francisco.
The study suggested increasing high-speed rail service to offer travelers alternatives to short flights. They also recommended letting busy airports charge fees on rush-hour flights to make airlines spread trips more evenly through the day.
The researchers recommended the creation of a federal commission including representatives of airlines and airports to decide the best way to improve efficiency of the nation’s air-travel system.
By David Wilkening
