> "The vast majority of delays are caused by weather," says Steve Brown,
> senior vice president for operations at the National Business Aviation
> Association, a group representing owners of private business aircraft. "The
> airlines have overscheduled everything so if the smallest weather pattern
> develops, you have cascading delays all day long."
<http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/07/13/askthepilot238/index.html>
[...]
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.
[...]
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."
Your attention please: With scattered exceptions, there is no such thing as a weather delay. They are traffic delays. Your flight was not late because of the weather. It was late because there are too many small airplanes carrying too few people, end of story.
[...]
-- Andy