Business Insight Zone

Thanks to James Fallows, I found Patrick Smith’s excellent “Ask the Pilot” item at Salon addressing the topic of airline delays:

Ask the pilot

Airport congestion and flight delays are making travelers insane. A look at what will and won’t solve the problem.

If you read one thing about airline congestion, read Smith’s article. Here is his basic assessment of the issue:

For the most part, the existing problem is not the result of air traffic control shortcomings, bad weather or any of the excuses passengers are used to hearing. It’s an airline scheduling issue, plain and simple. Carriers have created this mess through a self-defeating insistence that frequency of flights is the ultimate key to success. Over the past several years, they have portioned capacity onto smaller and smaller planes making more and more departures. The results of this strategy can be seen on any afternoon at airports such as JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Washington National, where small regional jets (RJs) account for up to half of all takeoffs and landings. It is not the total volume of passengers slowing things down, it’s the inefficient way they are divvied up. In some places, 50 percent of the traffic is carrying a quarter of the people.

He goes on to offer a detailed rebuttal to various proposals for fixing this problem before offering this verdict:

On the whole, I am not optimistic. I have little faith the industry will discover the sense of better scheduling, and even less faith in the government coming up with a fair and effective remedy. A year from now, we are likely to be hearing these same howls of outrage, about the same continuing problem — from the very same Americans who will continue to fly in record numbers.

Try to look on the bright side: Flying is astonishingly safe, fares are cheap, and planes go pretty much everywhere. The cost of an airline ticket is roughly equivalent to what it was in the early 1980s, and it’s possible to fly between practically any two major cities in the United States, or in the world for that matter, without so much as a fuel stop. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a catastrophic accident involving a major U.S. airline in nearly six years — our most impressive stretch ever.

That’s weak medicine, I know, when you’re stuck in a 50-plane queue waiting for takeoff. If you can find better advice, take it.

So, thank you to an airline pilot for offering this perspective and for explaining in much clearer terms the roots of the air-travel challenge. This may (only may) temper my ire the next time I rant about the poor business sense of most of the established players in the airline industry. But it convinces me more than ever that somebody — maybe a legislator, maybe an industry leader, maybe the next President of the United States — is going to crack this nut and usher in a revolution in air travel.