Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

More travelers, more flights, more-cramped airports: add in a dash of intermittent bad weather, and you’ve got a recipe for a lousy summer for air travel — at least, if you care about getting where you’re going on time. Joe Sharkey of the NYT and Scott McCartney of the WSJ have been all over this. Here are two recent samples of travelin’ woe from McCartney:

Airlines add delays into flight time

[...]Many delays are now simply being incorporated into schedules, at high cost to consumers and airlines. Congestion at airports and in the sky has forced airlines to pad their schedules more than ever so flights have a better chance of arriving “on time,” which the Department of Transportation defines as within 15 minutes of the airline’s scheduled arrival time. Flights may now arrive technically “on time,” but with 30 minutes or more of delay written into the flight plan. [...]

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Summer Flying Turns Ugly

[...] The number of flights canceled in the first 15 days of June was up a whopping 91% compared with the same period last year, and the number of flights that were excessively late — more than 45 minutes — jumped 61%, according to FlightStats.com. Overall, 70.7% of all U.S. flights arrived on time from June 1 through June 15, compared with 79% last year.

“I fly a lot, and I’ve never seen it this bad this systematically. It’s like the Italian train system,” said Nick Abbott, a vice president at networking concern Intelliden Corp. who was stuck in Philadelphia for two days after his flight on US Airways was delayed and then canceled last week. [...]

When I searched Google News just now for the term “canceled flights,” I got more than 1,600 hits. A few tidbits:

Northwest cancels hundreds of flights

United says computer outage that delayed, canceled flights was employee mistake

Area airports delayed; United resuming flights

As I’ve said before: At some point, somebody (besides Southwest) is going to figure out how to get around this; they’re going to deliver passengers on time, all the time; and they’re going to make a lot of money doing it.