Air travel: If it’s broke, why can’t we fix it?
By Bill Settlemyer
President and CEO, Setcom Media
A recent issue of BusinessWeek featured “Fear & Loathing at the Airport” as its cover story. The subtitle was “How a failure of leadership led to the summer from hell.”
As everyone knows, the air travel “system” (funny how you have to put that word in quotes so often these days) is broken. Massive flight cancellations, flight delays that have become the norm, passengers left stranded on the tarmac for hours and rising numbers of misplaced baggage are all symptoms of the problem.
And as safe as air travel is, insiders know that the safety margins are increasingly being compromised by an overtaxed air traffic control system using antiquated technology. They also know that the technology exists to make air travel safer and more efficient, but the FAA seems unable to move forward at the pace needed to create some relief.
Not getting better
According to BusinessWeek, the FAA is predicting a 36% increase in passengers by 2015. How will a system that can’t cope with current passenger volumes adapt to the increase? No one has a good answer to that.
BusinessWeek says the fundamental problem is organizational: Nobody is in charge. What that really means is that neither Congress, nor any administration, nor the public, have been successful in requiring that someone be given sufficient authority to make the changes that are so sorely needed.
Drilling deeper, the authors of the article find that the FAA is tied down by competing interests equipped with powerful lobbies and other means of blocking changes that might affect their particular interests adversely.
The airlines schedule more flights for certain times of the day than airports can possibly handle, one of the big reasons we wind up sitting in lines of 20 or 30 airplanes waiting to take off. And lobbies for general aviation and the corporate jet set want the convenience of access to large airports already overburdened with regularly scheduled airline traffic.
Congress talks a good game about supporting improvements in the system but balks when lobbyists for individual interest groups weigh in. The FAA has no borrowing authority of its own and the other players in the system are content to keep the FAA weak and incapable of imposing changes that could relieve congestion, improve on time performance and raise safety standards.
Is this really what we want?
Of course, airline executives are well aware of the misery of the flying public. Sadly, a travel columnist for a major national newspaper recently observed that given the tough economics of the airline business, the airlines would rather have a large volume of unhappy passengers than a smaller volume of happy ones.
The other factor is that even with all the competition spurred by airline deregulation, we as passengers are still basically a captive market in the sense that airline travel is the only practical way to take long trips. Driving or taking a train or bus just isn’t a practical alternative to flying.
Airline executives will also tell you that people want cheap fares above all else. Several years ago American Airlines experimented with taking out a few rows of seats to give passengers more legroom but couldn’t get passengers to pay the higher fares needed to make it work.
Still, everyone knows the flying public is not happy about the current state of affairs. Flying has become an ordeal to be endured out of necessity despite the best efforts of many airlines to deliver a pleasant experience on board their aircraft.
Penny wise, pound foolish
The funding of upgrades to the nation’s outdated air traffic control system is one example of short-sighted thinking. Understandably, after years of bruising losses and rising fuel prices, airlines don’t want to spend $600,000 per aircraft for equipment upgrades to implement a new digital navigation system.
Shouldn’t the federal government find a way to fund these costs out of tax dollars or fees that don’t have an adverse impact on the airlines? Have we forgotten that what the nation really needs is a viable system of air travel? Are we and our political leaders in Washington, D.C., unable to comprehend the incredible loss of productivity and stress on both business and leisure travelers, and the damage to our economy, from the current mess?
As mentioned above, one change the airlines are resisting is the imposition of scheduling changes that would prevent airlines from bunching all their departures so tightly that runway jams and delays on the ground are inevitable. This is one case where the FAA should have the power to come up with a fair system for spreading the load. And it’s a clear case for enforceable regulations because no individual airline wants to make voluntary concessions that would put it at a disadvantage with their competitors.
In the end, as the BusinessWeek article said, it’s a failure of leadership. But it’s also a failure of government and does not speak well for the current state of our particular brand of democracy. Thanks to political gridlock, it seems we just can’t fix anything anymore.
I think I have a solution, even though it’s a bit radical: Let’s persuade Switzerland to invade the U.S. and take over our transportation system. That’s the one country I’ve visited where all forms of transportation run on time.
There’s a hitch, of course. Their national airline, Swissair, went belly-up five years ago. But
hey, nobody’s perfect!
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