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.

"The purpose of the air transportation system is to move passengers and cargo. But the DOT and FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] treat the system as one that moves airplanes, and as a consequence they only report airport or flight specific performance."

According to Sherry's research, 23 percent of passengers traveled on delayed flights in 2006, totaling 66 million hours of flight delay. This information is all reported in the BTS statistics.

But he also found that 1.4 percent of passengers traveled on canceled flights, totaling an estimated 42 million hours of flight delays. Because canceled flights are not included in the BTS calculations, that means that 39 percent of all man hours lost due to flight delays go unreported, according to Sherry.

And the number is likelier even higher than that because Sherry's numbers do not include time lost by people who missed a connecting flight because their flight to the connecting city was delayed.

A 2004 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did study the total time lost by all "disrupted passengers" -- both canceled and delayed flights -- and found that when those numbers are included, the average delay increases from 15.4 minutes to 25.6 minutes, a jump of approximately 66 percent.

As the public takes notice, so too have politicians. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, has sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives that would require airlines to report information on flights that are diverted from their scheduled destinations and planes that leave their gates, sit on the tarmac for a period of time, and are then canceled and return to the gate without taking off.

"We need to have a total picture of what's going on in the aviation world, both in the skies and on the ground," Schmidt said in an interview from her Cincinnati office Thursday. She said that if this information is reported, consumers can better choose flights and minimize wait time.

Inaccurate and limited as the current information might be, asking the government to fully tabulate the full-time cost of travel to consumers may be impossible, according to Meara McLaughlin, the vice president for development and marketing at FlightStats, a firm that monitors flight delays.

To do so would require giving the government access to passenger itineraries so that it could track, for example, how long a person waited in Atlanta for a missed connection to New Orleans, which raised flags with privacy advocates and most citizens.

"I don't think you'd ever get a lawmaker who will say every movement by every traveler in North America should be tracked by the government," McLaughlin said. "You wouldn't want to even pursue that as a reasonable solution to the problem."

David Smallen, the BTS director of public affairs, echoed McLaughin, saying that tracking passengers would pose "significant logistical and privacy issues" that would first have to be worked out.

The Department of Transportation has responded to consumer pressure by undertaking a review of whether additional reporting criteria should be considered.

Meanwhile, private firms like FlightStats, which McLaughlin said provides more accurate flight delay information for individual flights, have been launched to meet consumers' demands.

In the meantime, what's a delayed passenger to do? Start a lobbying group, if you're Kate Hanni.

Or as with everything else in today's digital era, put your horror story on YouTube.

When his Delta flight from JFK to Dallas Forth Worth was delayed on the tarmac for seven hours June 25, Robert McKee filmed the ordeal and posted a video of it on YouTube that so far has garnered more than 100,000 hits.

The flight's announcements "started to contradict each other, and I figured every time they make an announcement I'm going to film it," McKee said. "I was just annoyed, ready to go home."