I'm waiting for a jet plane

The nation's air system is reaching a breaking point. Can it be fixed?

By William J. Holstein, Marianne Lavelle, and Anna Mulrine

How bad has United Airlines' service been lately? On July 19, Westword, a Denver alternative newspaper, launched a contest for readers entitled, "What United Did to My Summer Vacation." Selecting a winner won't be easy. There's the Boulder chiropractor who slogged through six airports in 13 hours to make it from San Diego to Denver. And the woman who was separated from her pooch and then put on different flights from Los Angeles to Denver; the dog, Pooh Bear, was locked in a crate for six hours. And the young couple who had their romantic weekend in New York spoiled by a 41/2-hour wait on the runway. Upon landing at 2 a.m., they discovered thatoopstheir bags were missing, too.

Of course, the newspaper doesn't think the contest will result in improved service at United, which has racked up more late arrivals, cancellations, and complaints than any U.S. airline, according to the most recent statistics. "But it's very therapeutic," says editor Patricia Calhoun.

United is by no means the only company that has turned the expression "airline service" into an oxymoron. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, this summer is already the worst travel season in American airline historyperiod. Air-traffic delays in June increased by 20.5 percent over the same month last year, to a record of more than 50,000 flights. The figures would be even worse if airlines weren't padding flight schedules by as much as 23 minutes to boost their "on time" arrivals.

For many travelers, airline bashing has become a blood sport. "I wouldn't send my dead dog on United," says Peggie Anderson, a San Diego pharmacist who endured four cancellations and lost bags on a trip to Fresno on July 5 and 6. Web sites with names like TravelProblems.com, PassengerRights.com, and ticked.com, as well as delta-sucks.com, untied.com, and NorthWorstAir.org, are attracting tens of thousands of visitors.

Cold-cocked. Unfortunately, some passengers are going beyond mere grousing. According to the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, which represents some flight attendants, the number of "air rage" incidents has increased 400 percent over the past five years. (As defined by the industry, air rage is a physical incident or verbal abuse that becomes physically threatening.) In one recent case, an unruly passenger aboard a Continental flight from Anchorage to Seattle threw a can of beer at a flight attendant and then bit a pilot who intervened.

"You put people on a hot, crowded aircraft and then you delay the flight," says William Lehman, vice president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a flight attendant on America West. "Who do people have on hand to punch out when they get frustrated? The flight attendants." During a delay at a gate at Phoenix, Lehman had to wrestle a 6-foot, 250-pound female passenger to the floor after she cold-cocked another attendant.

How did the nation's air system reach a breaking point? Ironically, it is a byproduct of prosperity. Some 670 million passengers will board U.S. airlines this year. That's more than twice the 250 million passengers who flew before the airlines were deregulated about two decades ago. Despite complaints about price gouging of business travelers and some recent fare hikes, airlines say the cost of flying in real terms (minus inflation) has actually declined. Most Americans can afford to fly.

As a result, more and more people are building air travel into their lifestyles. Jeffrey Shellan is a physicist who works at his home outside Denver, but his company is based in Anaheim, Calif., so he has to fly there frequently. His parents, meanwhile, live in Seattle, so he flies there as well. Others dash off to weddings or social events in distant cities, just for the weekend. It's a far cry from the days when folks would don their Sunday best for a rare flight. "Overall this is a good-news story," says Delta operations chief Mac Armstrong. "More people are flying, and they're flying because they want to."

All this has created much higher "load factors" for airlines. They typically sell about 80 percent of their seats these days, compared with 50 or 60 percent in bygone eras. That creates profits, but it also leaves much less room for error. On a recent holiday weekend, for example, Delta sold 408,000 of 416,000 available tickets. United says it experienced a load factor of 89.5 percent on June 30, a 35-year record.

When major hubs dominate air travelthe top 60 airports or so control more than 90 percent of the trafficthere's hardly any space for bumped passengers. The infrastructure for coping with such a dramatic surge in air travel simply hasn't kept pace. Even though the federal government deregulated the airlines in 1978, it still runs the air traffic control system behind every takeoff and landing. That system, designed in the 1940s, is an aging patchwork of different computers and communications networks.

Tech lag. Congress estimates it would cost at least $30 billion over the next five years to modernize the FAA's air traffic control system, yet it will appropriate only $3 billion a year for it. And Congress has attempted to micromanage the FAA's budget in a way that has prevented it from "doing the sort of long-range planning they need to do," says Ed Perkins, a consumer advocate for the American Society of Travel Agents (box, Page 37).

Meanwhile, local and regional governments haven't been willing to spend the money to modernize airports fast enough. Boston has been debating whether to build a new runway at Logan International Airportfor more than 20 years. Only one major new airport has been built, in Denver, in a decade or more.

As part of a never-ending blame game, the airlines finger different government agencies or the weather. United, for example, says that labor squabbles with pilots and mechanics are partly to blame for its woes, not to mention a punishing season of thunderstorms.

But the airlines themselves are hardly beyond reproach. The Department of Transportation's inspector general, Kenneth Mead, reported in July that unscheduled maintenance, slow fueling, baggage-handling snafus, delays in getting passengers aboard, and late-arriving crews accounted for 74 percent of delays in 1999. Yet at the same time, the FAA determined that weather was really the cause of 68 percent of late departures. The FAA records only what it must by lawthe cause of delay after a plane has left the gate, not before. And the airlines don't have to tell anyone the reasons for gate delays. Contentious relations with a raft of different unions also make it hard to get to the bottom of what delays a flight.

Critics say the airlines intentionally conceal information. In the DOT's June report card on passenger rights, inspectors found that delays in some instances were known by the airlines up to four hours before departure but were not communicated to passengers until after the aircraft had been boarded and pushed away from the gate. "Airlines know that if they told you honestly what was going on, people would hop on another airline, and they'd have to pay for it," says Paul Hudson, director of the Airline Consumer Action Project.

The airlines deny these charges and say they are trying to improve service. It's easy to be cynical about their pledges. United has announced an acquisition of US Airways, which is still pending antitrust approval. If that deal goes through, American, Northwest, Delta, and Continental are expected to seek their own combinations. On another front, the U.S. Department of Justice is suing American Airlines for alleged anticompetitive practices against low-cost challengers. To critics, the airlines are simply trying to create a climate of opinion in Washington that will allow them to consolidateand stave off efforts by the feds to "re-regulate" them.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000814/air.htm

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), August 08, 2000

Answers

I'm not really interested in "more than twice" as many people flying now than two decades ago. How does this year compare with last year? How come this year -- the year in which, hey! nothing went wrong at the rollover -- is, apparently, so much worse than last year?

-- lili (lili@castlemark-nospam-honey.com), August 10, 2000.