Flight Delays Bad and Getting Worse

Today's New York Times business section features a piece called "Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later." To read the whole piece, click soon, because free access to Times articles scrolls off after a week. Reporters Jeff Bailey and Nate Schweber wrote: "As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

"That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted."

I never really thought about that, but it's true that passenger lateness for connecting flights is really what counts when we are the passengers in question -- not whether one single flight is 15 or 20 minutes late. My longest delay ever (and I hope never to trump it, ever) was 11 years ago, when my husband, my son and a friend were returning from Tanzania. We were flying KLM from Arusha to Amsterdam with a stop in Dar es Salaam and then connecting to Detroit and Denver. Someone rammed into the cargo door of our aircraft with a forklift (a total accident, not a terr'ist incident). Bottom line is that we ended up flying two two airlines we hadn't planned to fly (an Air Tanzania charter, followed by a three-movie flight in the crying children's section of Air Madagascar) via three countries we hadn't planned to stop in (Kenya, Germany, France). We arrived home almost three days late.

Our misery was on international flights, but the reporters note that "In the first five months of 2007, more than a quarter of all flights within the United States arrived at least 15 minutes late. And more of those flights were delayed for long stretches, an average of 39 percent longer than a year earlier....

"Some other airline delay statistics, meanwhile, are getting a fresh look, as well. After thousands of passengers were stranded for hours on tarmacs in New York and Texas this past winter, consumer advocates began complaining that Transportation Department data does not accurately track such meltdowns.

"If a flight taxies out, sits for hours, and then taxies back in and is canceled, the delay is not recorded. Likewise, flights diverted to cities other than their destination are not figured into delay statistics."

Using Continental Airlines as an example, the reporters noted, "Continental operates big hubs in Houston and Newark and one day last week, 1,658 passengers missed connections, which was 4.29 percent of those connecting. That is a typical level of missed connections, but Continental’s flights that day were 89.6 percent full, so finding seats on later flights for some passengers was difficult.

"The airline alters its schedule when flights chronically lead to missed connections. For instance, it recently extended by 10 minutes minimum connection times in Houston for passengers traveling from Panama City, Panama, because some were not clearing customs in time.
Continental also has a new system that sends e-mail messages — and, beginning next month, text messages to cellphones — informing connecting passengers on late flights how they have been rebooked.

"It also is moving ticket kiosks inside the security area so passengers can print new boarding passes without going out to the main ticketing area or having to wait in line for a gate agent to help them."

I'm flying again tomorrow -- Air Canada, not Continental, and a nonstop rather than a connecting flight. Wish me luck anyway.