Ask the pilot

As delays hit record levels, a closer look at how airline scheduling practices are killing travel.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

July 13, 2007 | I know, you were hoping I'd have something to say about last Sunday's rollout of the Boeing 787. According to Boeing, the plane will reintroduce passengers to the glamour and excitement of air travel. As if bigger windows and improved cabin lighting will win the public's heart. I'm sure it's a swell plane, even if they insist on calling it "Dreamliner," but it strikes me that the marketers at Boeing aren't fully in tune with the things people hate about flying. More on that in a moment.

To be honest, I find rollout ceremonies boring. Not that I've ever been to one, but they sure look boring on television. Or maybe I'm just jealous, since I never get invited. Doubtless the big-name writers were in Seattle for the curtain pull: Joe Sharkey from the New York Times, Scott McCartney from the Wall Street Journal, Alan Levin from USA Today. Why not me? First the A380 rollout, and now this. No respect.

But there are bigger things going on, frankly. Speaking of Alan Levin, maybe you caught his front-page story earlier this week on the nightly tarmac gridlock at Kennedy airport. The situation at JFK has reached a breaking point, and it is symptomatic of a nationwide crisis. Maybe Levin was distracted by 787 fever, but like almost everyone else who has written about the worsening problem of congestion and delays, he neglects to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the hundreds of small regional planes -- those "Express" and "Connection" code-share flights -- that are jockeying for space, both on the ground and aloft, with larger planes.

These code-share arrangements have been around for decades but have spread tremendously in recent years thanks to the advent of fast and efficient regional jets, or RJs. Their small size and large numbers add up to a disproportionate impact on traffic flow. From an airspace point of view, a plane is a plane is a plane, regardless of how many chairs are on board. At some airports, regionals make up half of total traffic while carrying only a quarter of the passengers. Not to hammer this topic more than is due -- we gave it a good going over back in June -- but with summer delays at record levels it's worth reiterating, particularly since neither the carriers nor the FAA seem interested in taking the matter seriously, choosing instead to blame "weather" and air-traffic-control equipment shortcomings for what in truth is an airline scheduling issue.

I recently returned to airline flying after a nearly six-year hiatus. Obviously the business has been transformed since 2001, from security to salaries, but two unpleasant changes have jumped out at me.

First is the weather. This is wholly anecdotal and by no means a scientific observation, but the number and strength of thunderstorms and convective activity seem drastically worse than in years past. This is especially true in and around the crowded Northeast corridor. I spent several years based in New York and Boston in the early and mid-1990s. Summer thunderstorms were at worst an occasional, maybe weekly occurrence. Now they are hitting almost every afternoon, with lines of majestically sculpted cumulonimbus clouds ripping through New England as if it were tropical Africa.

Regardless of what is or isn't causing this climatic weirdness, its impact wouldn't be half so bad if not for the staggering volume of air traffic attempting to navigate through and around it. I've never seen anything like it. Long waits and holding patterns are routine now, even on clear sunny days. And an ever-growing percentage of that traffic is made up of regionals. Check out those evening conga lines at Kennedy, and you're liable to spot a 500-passenger Boeing 747 sandwiched between four 50-seaters. Elsewhere it's similar. At LaGuardia and Washington-National, the number of RJs and, to a lesser extent, turboprop feeder craft, is astonishing, often outnumbering the Boeings and Airbuses of the majors.

At least in theory, regional aircraft provide a valuable service, connecting small, outlying markets with major cities. Passengers in Madison, Wis., or Bangor, Maine, can step aboard a sleek, sophisticated RJ and be whisked to Chicago or Boston in a matter of minutes, be it as their final destination or a place to make an onward connection. One problem is, airlines have taken to using these planes on longer trunk routes. Today you can fly from New York to Dallas, Chicago or Miami in what used to be called a "commuter plane."

During a 90-minute ground delay at LaGuardia a couple of weeks ago, I watched 14 regional jets taxi toward the runway in a row. Granted some were headed to Binghamton or Buffalo, N.Y., or Columbus, Ohio, but just as many were destined for Boston, Detroit and other major cities. Over at the U.S. Airways terminal that afternoon, the tails of 23 RJs and Dash-8 turboprops could be counted amid four or five Airbus A320s and a couple of 737s.

To be fair, RJs aren't the only culprits, and admittedly there's a certain chicken-or-egg aspect to the whole mess. One could easily argue that this isn't an RJ problem so much as a scheduling problem in general. Southwest Airlines has been advertising hourly 737 service between Manchester, N.H., and Philadelphia. That's 12 Boeings daily -- 12 -- from Manchester (population 110,000) to Philly. Keep that in mind next time you're supposed to be in PHL, but find yourself sitting on a tarmac hundreds of miles away, waiting out a two-hour ground stop. Airlines sell frequency. And, right or wrong, passengers buy it. Twelve daily flights between cities A and B is always a stronger selling point than five -- no matter if those 12 flights seldom arrive on time. Heck, when the storms move in and everything goes to hell, blame it on "the weather."

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