Revealed: The Unhappy Truth Behind Airlines' 'Schedule Inflation' And Why It's Important To Bring Lots of Reading Material Aboard

Around 5:30 Monday evening, I boarded Northwest flight 735 from New York's JFK to Minneapolis-St. Paul, a distance of about 1,027 miles that normally takes just over two hours to fly.  But the airline's schedule clocked the trip at three hours and 17 minutes.  Why?  Because there's a daily traffic jam on the runways of JFK during the early evening; my fellow passengers and I spent an hour in a long line with other aircraft waiting to take off.  

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the paper's excellent aviation writer, Scott McCartney, provided a revealing look at the enormous growth in schedule inflation--the increasing time it's taking planes to complete routine flights despite the fact that jets today fly faster then they used to and have more sophisticated avionics that allow them to chart more direct routes.  The culprit: airport congestion and the FAA, which lags behind the airlines in being able to route aircraft more directly.

I spent years taking the Eastern Air Lines (you remember them, don't you?) and Delta shuttles almost weekly between Washington, DC, and New York in the '80s and early '90s.  The actual flying time was--and still is--about 30 minutes.  But most trips took an hour because of congestion at LaGuardia airport.  Today's commuters look back on that schedule longingly--some DC-NYC shuttles routinely take two hours now.   

In 1997, American Airlines' flight 29 departing New York for Los Angeles at 7:05 p.m. took just under six hours to cross the country; today, American flight 21, departing at the same time, takes 23 minutes longer. 

The future was supposed to signal progress, and while I never quite believed the new milennium would find us all equipped with Jetson-like jet packs that would zip us about at will, I did think more sophisticated aircraft and airports would continue to make traveling easier and more efficient.  Aircraft enginners have generally kept up their part of the bargain, but airports haven't upgraded sufficiently to handle passenger load.  And, as McCartney notes, an outmoded, national radio beacon system on the ground still means airplanes must meander through the skies from point to point instead of taking an as-the-crow-flies direct route from Point A to Point B.

And Minneapolis-based commercial aviation watchdog Terry Trippler adds to our understainding of why fllying trips are longer rather than shorter: Too many flights. That's not to say that we should allow fewer people to fly; it's that airlines, in an effort to offer an expanded menu of departure and arrival times, are putting smaller planes on routes so they can offer more flights a day.  Sometimes they're not necessarily carrying any more passengers between cities than they did a decade ago.  But those additional flights on smaller planes mean more take off and landings.  Which means more congestion.

I wish I could belive that things will get better in the next year or so, but they won't.  And with some chagrin, I looked this moring at a ticket I bought for an upcoming New York City trip in July and noted I would be returning to my hometown of St. Paul on the same flight out of JFK that I flew Monday night.  As our pilot told the passengers when we pulled away from our gate and became number 20 in a line of aircraft waiting to depart, "This is routine at JFK at this time of night."  Which is why Northwest's schedule allows three-and-a-half hours for the trip. 

Technically, if a flight departs or takes off within a half hour of its scheduled times, it's considred "on time."  In the case of Northwest 735 and more and more flights these days, building routine delays into the published schedule is a facile way of suggesting things are working just fine.  And no one knows more than weary frequent travelers that, these days, that just ain't so.