Consumer Alert: Flying Is Worse Than You Think

July 5, 2007 — -- Kate Hanni never spent nine hours sitting in a plane on the tarmac at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

At least that's true according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, or BTS, which tracks flight delays for the Department of Transportation.

After Hanni's Dec. 29, 2006, flight -- American Airlines flight 1348 from San Francisco to Dallas -- was diverted to Austin, Texas, because of bad weather, the plane did in fact sit on the tarmac for nearly nine hours while its passengers waited, without food or an explanation as to why they could not disembark.

But because the plane was diverted from Dallas, BTS statistics simply classified it as "diverted" and did not register those waiting hours anywhere in its publicly released tabulation of delayed arrival times.

"There was no information on our time on the tarmac," Hanni said. "Nothing."

In response to their ordeal, Hanni and some of her fellow passengers have started the Coalition for an Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights, which has lobbied Congress to require airline carriers and the BTS to include those flights that wait on the tarmac and are canceled before departing in its tabulation of airline delays.

Hanni's experience highlights a series of loopholes in the reporting of airline delays that significantly deflates the actual time passengers spend waiting around for their jet to take off.

The problem is that while BTS data calculates how late flights are in arriving at their destinations, it ignores how late passengers are in arriving at their destinations. If your flight from New York to Chicago is canceled before you board, diverted to Detroit or sits on the tarmac at JFK Airport for hours before being canceled, you will likely arrive several hours late to your destination.

But those lost minutes are never included in the BTS calculations when measuring flight tardiness.

According to Lance Sherry, an associate professor of operations research at George Mason University who studies airline delays, government airline agencies focus too much on machines and not enough on passengers, resulting in dissonance between reported flight delay numbers and the actual time lost by passengers.