Why your flight is late
Salon's "Ask the Pilot" guy explains why flights are getting later and later - it's a traffic jam:
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.
It's a good article that explains the problem (and why solutions are probably unlikely) pretty well. Air travel has always required patience; it's probably not going to get better anytime soon.
Comments
sigh
[ Troy Brumley] October 5, 2007 7:50:31.060
Comment by Troy Brumley
I know, it's a fantasy on my part, but why oh why can't we get back to trains in this country? They seem to work quite well in Europe.
Re: Why your flight is late
[ James Robertson] October 5, 2007 8:37:03.861
Comment by James Robertson
Outside of a small diameter, trains are not useful. Say I want to travel from the Baltimore area to Cincinnati. That's a distance of 500 miles. By air, it's a tad over an hour. By train? Say we built out the infrastructure for trains that traveled at 200 mph. Even a direct route would be twice the time required for air, and would likely be lots more expensive (you would have to pay down the build cost). Heck, by car the journey would be around 8 hours, and a ton less expensive than the train.
Trains work in the northeast corridor, the coast of California, and could also be useful in a handful of other places where cities are relatively close. Beyond that, the distances in the US are just too big - and the costs way, way to big. You simply cannot build a fast train system for a price that would be worth it given the distances involved.
Trains
[Tom Sattler] October 5, 2007 9:08:48.209
Trains might become more attractive as pre-flight check-in and security becomes more time-consuming and intrusive. If you have to get to the airport two hours before a flight, and the flight is always an hour late, that's three hours that you have to consider part of your travel time. It's suddenly not a two-hour flight any more; it's now a five-hour flight.
Auction landing slots
[Jeff Hallman] October 5, 2007 11:13:11.732
The author dismisses the idea of peak-load pricing that has been shown to work in many contexts, saying it will raise ticket prices. But look at your ticket next time and see how much of your fare is actually taxes. If you limit the number of landings, and auction them in real time, obviously the airport will collect some money. But if all or most of that money is used to reduce the various taxes on tickets, there may not be much of a price increase at all. You also provide powerful incentives for smaller planes to move to other airports and for flights to shift to less busy times. Even weather-related flight delays will be reduced, as the big jets will pay to move to the head of the line during a storm.
Re: Why your flight is late
[ Terry] October 5, 2007 11:30:36.247
Comment by Terry
I would expect that security checks for trains will approach the same level as for planes
[Tom Sattler] October 5, 2007 23:44:41.082
> Comment by Terry
> I would expect that security checks for trains will approach the same level as for planes
Re: Why your flight is late
[ Terry] October 7, 2007 18:51:21.952
Comment by Terry
Tom
A properly placed bomb can create quite a train wreck and casualties. If train usage were to become more popular in the US then the impact of a bomb would be more significant.