The Pros and Cons of Fixing Flight Delays

N E W   Y O R K, Feb. 12 -- You cannot fit a gallon of milk into a quart-sized jar — at best, you'll spill a lot of milk — but that kind of forced delivery seems to be what the aviation industry is trying these days.

The air traffic system is bursting at the seams, with record numbers of passengers and flights clogging U.S. airports, creating bottlenecks on runways and in the air.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledges more than 450,000 flight delays last year — a 20 percent jump over 1999 — and attributes about a fifth of those to runway congestion, equipment problems or traffic volume. And officials admit those figures are an underestimate, since they depend on highly specific definitions of "delay," and don't necessarily measure all the holdups experienced by passengers.

But flight delays are a little like the weather — everybody talks about it, but nobody seems to do anything about it. And in spite of the growing problem and growing outcry from travelers, that's not likely to change soon.

It's not that people aren't trying. Various technologies are being developed to make flying and air traffic control more efficient, including using the global positioning satellite system. There's talk of softening air traffic control rules, building more airports and runways, and of better managing the pace of flights.

But few options are actually on the table that would dramatically reduce the number of delays, in the short or the long term. And there is disagreement over how well each option would work, if at all, or if it would actually make the current situation worse.

Not Enough Runways? Build Some More!

How did we get here? Deregulation of the airlines in 1978 was intended to broaden air service and make it more affordable. It succeeded all too well. The number of flights has nearly doubled, the number of passengers flown annually has risen from just over 250 million in 1978 to approximately 600 million in 1999. Access by customers at smaller airports has increased, while fares have fallen.

Unfortunately, airport infrastructure has not kept pace. Only two new airports — Denver International and Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport — have been built. And during the last 10 years, only six new runways have been added at large hub airports.

Experts say more airports and runways are the surest ways to improve the situation, and airport executives are clamoring for them. Virginia Buckingham, executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Boston's Logan International Airport, is part of a coalition of airport administrators lobbying for expedited construction of new runways.

"The construction of runways needs to be a national priority just like the infrastructure priorities of past centuries — the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, all were driven from the federal government as a national priority overcoming significant local political obstacles," she said.

John Mazor of the Air Line Pilots Association also thinks runways are the practical answer: "Every one of those airplanes that's up in the sky had to have an airport and piece of concrete to take off from and he's got to have another airport and another piece of concrete to land on," he said. "So the airplanes funnel out of the airports into the sky and then they funnel back into the airports. We just cannot get around the fact that we must build airports and runways at a much greater rate than we have over the past two or three decades."