Ask the Pilot

If ever there was a story that needs to go away, it's this one, but there are too many people out there who keep the coals glowing. Yes, I'm guilty of indulging them, but somebody needs to throw the cold water. There is, it seems, a certain segment of the population that wants to believe these people are out there, despite a lack of evidence, and despite all common sense, indicating otherwise. It's a conviction that is almost religious in the way it submits and justifies itself. Such paranoid pathologies are not unheard of in times of national stress. If left unchecked, they are dangerous.

Getting back to the JFK airport plot, should the next act of deadly sabotage turn out to be an inside job, not everyone will be surprised. But we'll partly have ourselves to blame, for having wasted our time and money frisking pilots, confiscating knitting needles, and chasing spectral boogeymen instead of intercepting the right people.

Meanwhile, real or imagined, the threat of danger isn't keeping Americans at home. Airfares have tumbled 15 percent from where they were a year ago, and a record 200 million people are expected to fly this summer, in what some experts predict will be the busiest three-month period in industry history.

And the most frustrating. Inspired by my June 1 column on air traffic delays (I should be so influential), USA Today ran a splashy front-page story the following day announcing that the first four months of 2007 were the most delay-plagued we've seen in 13 years. According to a report from the Department of Transportation, only 72 percent of domestic flights operated by the country's 20 largest airlines arrived on time between January and April. What this promises for June, July and August can only be brutal.

What I wish the paper had better explained are the reasons why. The DOT tells us that 40 percent of the delays were "weather related" -- one of the more misleading expressions in all of commercial aviation. I've said it before and I'll say it again: There is almost no such thing as a weather delay, per se. For all intents and purposes, weather delays are traffic delays. That's semantic in some regard, but if it weren't for the inefficient ways in which the airlines attempt to move their customers, jamming them into hundreds of small regional jets instead of consolidating with larger planes, storms would have much less impact. This is especially true in the busy Northeast corridor, where the worst performing airports are located. (LaGuardia, Newark and JFK had the three ugliest records of the entire DOT study.)

Let's return to last week's list of the top-10 busiest airports in the world, measured by number of takeoffs and landings: Chicago O'Hare, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston Intercontinental, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Notice that all 10 are in the United States. A number of e-mailers suspected the ranks were in error. Who would have thought that Philadelphia or Minneapolis would have more traffic than Tokyo, Frankfurt or London's Heathrow? But they do. (Salt Lake City sees as many takeoffs and landings as Heathrow, transporting a third as many passengers. If you want to reduce commercial aviation's carbon footprint, there's a place to start.)

If you rejigger to account for total number of passengers, the top 10 is very different. Heathrow, for example, comes in at third place, with Tokyo's Haneda, Paris' Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Amsterdam all checking in. Suddenly only five of the busiest airports are American.

This difference is a powerful illustration of how and why our air system is nearing perpetual gridlock. The problem isn't too many people flying, but how many planes they are flying in. Our airlines sell frequency, or the illusion thereof, creating a system so immense, and so precarious, that a single thunderstorm throws the entire thing into paralysis.

How we got to this point is fodder enough for six more columns. In short, it was all about cost. Airline cost structures grew so out of whack that the logical approach to carrying more passengers -- i.e., using bigger planes -- was turned on its head. The cheapest way of moving people turned out to be, and to some extent remains, outsourcing to 50-70-seaters flown by affiliate outfits with rock-bottom expenses. Through the magic of code-sharing, these companies could paint their planes in your livery and pretend to be you. That gave us the explosion of Expresses, Connections, Airlinks and all the other suffixed alter egos now clogging tarmacs across America. (There's a mirage of seamlessness, but apart from the paint job, most of these affiliates are independent entities, with their own employees -- including pilots making 9 bucks an hour.)

Now that the majors have sliced and diced their way to stability, the advantages of regional-jet farming aren't so strong. Whether the industry's fiscal health, boosted by a merger or two along the way, results in widespread consolidation of flights remains to be seen. I have my doubts. Imagining a sky with fewer planes is a bit like imagining our highways with fewer cars. Short of an economic catastrophe ("peak oil," et al.), chances of its happening are slim.

Next week: Readers chime in. What are the best, worst and weirdest airports in the world?

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