Ten ways to outsmart the airlines and not spend your holiday season at the airport Schlotzsky's
In the past year, I have flown on 110 flights—and 11 arrived on time. As awful as that performance is, it doesn't even reflect the worst travel nightmares of the year, including record numbers of lost bags, overflowing lavatories, and the infamous JetBlue odyssey in which passengers were trapped on the tarmac for nearly 11 hours. In the first half of the year, more than 93,000 flights were canceled, an increase of 44 percent over the first half of 2006, according to the Department of Transportation. Yes, 2007 will go down as the worst year in history for flight delays, cancellations, and stranded passengers since they started keeping records of these things.
How did we get from bad to so much worse? Well, the Federal Aviation Administration is using a nearly 20-year-old computer system, and it shows. Among its many drawbacks, the air traffic control system does not adjust for increasing capacity in the sky. On the morning of June 8, 2007, a common scenario played out: The 20-year-old computers in Atlanta failed, and when the FAA rerouted flight-plan data to Salt Lake City, those computers overloaded. The result? Virtually every airplane on the East Coast was grounded for an average of four hours.
As if that's not enough, major carriers are understaffed and, as a result, have been canceling hundreds of flights in the last week or so of each month, creating massive delays (and stranding thousands) throughout the hub systems. Northwest, one of the worst offenders, is operating with 15 to 25 percent fewer pilots and copilots than it employed in 2000. The inevitable result is massive crew shortages at the end of each month when Northwest's remaining pilots "time out" and can no longer fly. (According to federal regulations, pilots may not fly more than 100 hours a month.) In the last week of June, a particularly bad month, Northwest canceled more than 1,000 flights.
Regional jets clogging the runways are another huge headache. Flying on one of these puddle jumpers requires you to be a contortionist. But it's what you don't see with RJs that really hurts you. Because they take up as much gate space and airspace as the big jets—but carry just 30 to 100 passengers a flight, compared with as many as 365 in a Boeing 777—they are adding more traffic without getting more people to their destinations. Last year, approximately half of Chicago O'Hare's flights were RJs.
With planes flying near capacity, a delay of a few hours can turn into a 24-hour nightmare. Here's how it works: If a crew has to wait too long, it can "time out," and the flight can't take off until a replacement crew arrives. But if incoming planes are packed and can't accommodate the replacement crew—well, you'd better find a motel. Here's how to avoid the crush of modern commercial aviation.
Watch the calendar. Schedule air travel for the first 20 days of the month. That reduces the chances that your flight will be canceled because the pilot or crew has already hit the maximum monthly limit of 100 hours of work.
Avoid "direct" flights. The only good flight is a nonstop flight. Labeling a flight "direct" is an airline euphemism that means you'll stop at least once, exponentially increasing your chances of being delayed.
