Flight Delays Worse than Stats Reveal

Aug. 11, 2007 — -- On a recent Continental Airlines flight to Minneapolis, Pete Burkholder and his wife were stranded on a Newark Airport runway for eight hours.

"As you're sitting there, you keep thinking, 'This has got to end,'" said Burkholder. "And one hour passes, and another, and it's really almost like 'The Twilight Zone.'"

The air traffic control delay even angered the pilot.

"By the end, he was saying such things as, 'This is horrible, this is inexcusable, people are lying to us,'" said Burkholder. "I think he was really trying to keep himself from just all out swearing."

The eight-hour wait was never officially reported to the Department of Transportation, which releases monthly numbers on flight delays.

The DOT requires airlines to report delays, but not if the flight is canceled, which is what eventually happened with the Burkholders.

"Those were some long hours, and they don't count for anything," said Burkholder's wife Martha, who missed a friend's bachelorette party because of the delay.

This summer is shaping up to be the worst ever for delays, but the dismal numbers don't tell the whole story, because they measure late planes, not late passengers.

For instance, if you arrive three hours late and miss a connection, it can take hours or days to re-book another flight because planes are flying nearly full this summer. But officially, the only delay that's reported is the initial, three-hour-late arrival.

The same rule applies if your plane is diverted to another city. It's counted solely as a diversion, and the subsequent delay goes unreported.

"It's clearly a case where the passenger perception differs markedly from the statistics," said airline analyst Bob Mann of R.W. Mann & Co.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is currently updating a 2000 study which found the average delay was, in fact, 66-percent longer than the official DOT number when cancellations, diversions, and missed connections were factored into the equation.

"For every 20 reported delays, there's probably at least one more delay that goes unrecorded," said Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com.