Posted on: Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Growing congestion noted in U.S. air traffic
By Dan Reed
USA Today
Recession and terrorism nearly cleared U.S. skies and airports in 2001, but congestion — with all its aggravations — is returning to the lives of air travelers.
The U.S. Department of Transportation's key statistical indicators of congestion — late arrivals, canceled flights, taxi-out times, runway delays and mishandled bags — all rose in 2004. Each had bottomed out in 2002 or 2003.
Taxi-out times and runway delays last year returned to their peak levels of 2000, while other indicators remain below where they were during the last travel boom. The annual increases in 2004 reflect the addition of flights as airlines increase capacity to meet rising demand.
Today, there are 29,564 scheduled commercial-jet departures, up 9 percent from two years ago. Total flights still lag behind pre-Sept. 11 totals of January 2001 by 7 percent.
In an interview, Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey said air traffic is coming back to pre-Sept. 11 levels but is doing so "in different patterns, and with different characteristics" than before.
Two big hub operations at St. Louis and Pittsburgh have closed in the past two years, and a third, Delta's at Dallas/Fort Worth, closes this month, reducing the operational burdens there. But low-cost carrier and regional jet growth elsewhere more than offsets that.
"Clearly, we are seeing rising congestion," she says.
Government statistics don't tell the full story, says Basil Barimo, vice president of operations and safety at the Air Transport Association, the industry's main trade group.
Late arrivals would be even higher if airlines had not lengthened many of their published flight times.
"A flight that used to take an hour may not be an hour flight anymore — it's an hour-and-a-half flight," Barimo says. "It shows up as an 'on-time arrival.' But passengers aren't getting to their destination as fast" as they used to.
Congestion, and its attending problems, are likely to get worse. Congestion increases with industry capacity, and airlines' capacity is expected to grow nearly 7 percent this year.
That's enough to make up for even the possible shutdown of the most endangered of the big carriers, US Airways.
Though weather-related disruptions are beyond the airlines' control, their ability to recover quickly is hampered by rising congestion, says industry consultant Jon Ash at InterVistas-ga2.
"The system is becoming very fragile again, like it was in the late 1990s," he says. When anything goes wrong, the number of passengers and flights affected, and the associated costs, quickly skyrocket.
The most notable signs of congestion-related problems came as holiday travel demand pushed the system to its limits. Delta-owned Comair had to cancel a day's flights. US Airways canceled hundreds of flights and misplaced thousands of bags.
