Travel on Sale; Flight Delays Drop

With fewer flights and fewer airline passengers, flight delays are down too -- but not by much

Anyone with the time and money to travel can reap the benefits of lower prices, frequent fare sales and discounts, discounts, discounts and, did I mention?, discounts. This reduction in both passengers and scheduled flights meant fewer airline delays in 2008 than in '07, according to a new report by George Mason University's Center for Air Transportation Systems Research. Academic types have gathered data to tell frequent flyers what we already know: air travel might be getting cheaper, but in many respects, the experience still, well, sucks.

The center calculated that airline passengers experienced delays totaling 299 million hours (34,000 years!) in 2008, which roughly translates to an annual cost of $8.2 billion in lost productivity. If the center had also quantified the impact of slow-moving security lines and slow-arriving baggage, the lost productivity numbers would be even higher.

“While passenger trip delay numbers are improved, the structural issues with the air transportation system remain,” said Lance Sherry, an associate professor at George Mason University and author of the report. “The reduction of flights should have taken some pressure off of the system. This did not happen."

According to Sherry, the average delay was down only two minutes for an average delay of 29 minutes. Twenty-nine or 31 minutes on anybody's watch is a half-hour delay. "Disruptions" seem to be worse than mere "delays." Dishearteningly for anyone heading for the airport, for the last two years, one-quarter of passengers experienced a travel disruption. In 2008 disruptions averaged "only" 108 minutes; in 2007, it was 112 minutes. The glimmer of good news is that this represents a 10 overall percent decrease in delays compared to 2007.

Contributing to the problems were that airlines reduced the number of flights by 6 percent and also switched to smaller, less expensive aircraft flying less frequently, according to Sherry. "The airlines cut the least profitable flights that operate at off-peak times of the day. Eliminating these flights did little to trim delays for the profitable flights that are still over scheduled in the peak hours at the major airports...Fewer flights were cancelled in 2008, but those passengers also had fewer rescheduling options because of the reduced frequency of flights and fully booked flights."

The fewest trip delays were experienced on Hawaiian Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Frontier Airlines, all with an average of 10 minutes or less. Passengers endured the most trip delays on American Airlines, with an average delay of 31 minutes.

For the third consecutive year, passengers experienced an average of trip delays of more than 30 minutes at New York's three airports: Newark, LaGuardia and JFK, and also at Chicago's O'Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth and Boston's Logan . Of the nation's busiest 35 airports the fewest delays were at Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Baltimore/Washington, Phoenix Sky Harbor and Chicago's Midway.

If you want to delve deep into the data, you can see the U.S. Airline Passenger Trip Delay Report online.