Overnight my phone was blowing up with texts from people stranded in various cities around the country, reporting on delayed and missed flights, cancelled departures, long hours on the tarmac, too many rounds of drinks in the airport bar waiting for a flight that never takes off. We had all gathered for the weekend, and many were flying back home.
My own estimate based on recent observation is that half the flights don’t go as planned. Official estimates are closer to one quarter of flights that are delayed or cancelled. Regardless, if it is your flight and your itinerary that is affected, the rate is 100 percent.
This is a serious problem for anyone organizing an in-person meeting. It’s become a factor in event planning. No longer can one count on a ticket for a flight that arrives an hour before some scheduled event. It’s safer to get there the day before just in case. You might be wasting time and money, but the risk that travel plans will be disrupted is just too great.
What most of us believed was a temporary problem born of pandemic-related disruption seems to have become a major endemic issue affecting airline travel itself. It’s bad enough to deal with the inconveniences of high security, long lines, minimalist packing demands, confiscations of cuticle scissors and shampoo bottles, uncomfortable seating, bad snacks, and so on.
We can put up with all that provided the planes actually leave on time. No longer can one count on that. FlightAware offers data from just yesterday in the United States: Total delays were 9,655, and total cancellations were 1,822. This is not an unusual day.
The concern developed a few years back that air travel was getting more and more unreliable. This seems to be the pattern today. Americans might be getting used to it, assuming that this is normal. It’s not. My friends in Latin America and Europe don’t seem to have an issue with this at all. They book a flight, hop on and off, and go on their merry way. When they visit the United States, they are shocked at how shabby American service has become and how people put up with this daily.
What are customers supposed to do? There is no one to whom we can complain who makes a difference. The poor flight attendants bear the brunt of the anger, but there is nothing they can do either way. They are governed by forces outside their control. There is a shortage of pilots, and the ones who show up do a good job, so they are not to blame. The airports are understaffed, and it makes no sense to scapegoat the people who are there.
Trying to get customer service to fix the problem leads to an endless cycle of on-hold music, phone trees, artificial intelligence (AI) recordings, conversations with people whose English is unintelligible, and likely a dead end. When you use a third-party booking service, you end up with everyone blaming everyone else and insisting that someone else bears responsibility.
I recently bought some kind of flight insurance, thinking that this was wise. Sure enough my flight was cancelled, and so I naturally assumed that it would be fully reimbursed. When I went to trigger that, I was sent over to a new agency and a new log in. The questions concerning my case were long and investigatory, which made sense once I realized that an adjustor would be assigned to my case. I was clearly looking at an hour of frustration and probably months of delays without any assurance that anything would come of it. So of course I ate the ticket.
We all have stories. I was recently put on a flight roulette and a day of delays that ended in a midnight flight cancellation. This of course caused me to book a hotel for $120 and take an Uber to the place. When I got there, there was an entire waiting room of people with cobwebs on them and no employees in the entire hotel. It was literally empty but for the unserved customers.
Shocked, I grabbed my bags and made my way out into the night on foot looking for another option. I found one, but it was now 2 a.m. The new flight left at 6 a.m., and—you guessed it—that one was cancelled too. I tried briefly to get my money back from the other hotel but entered into the strange world in which no one was responsible. The chain told me to talk to the third party, and the third party told me to call the chain. Frustrated and needing to get back to actual life, I ate that too.
As for the flight, there was no point in even bothering. All told I spent some $600 and nothing to show for it. You could say that I should have made more calls, stayed on hold, shot off emails to malefactors, but that itself is a huge cost. There is nothing to be gained by spending your life in protest mode.
On another occasion flying out of Washington, D.C., recently, I noted some delays, so I decided not to take a chance and booked the Amtrak instead. I was already home in bed when my phone was blowing up about more delays and finally a new departure time of 5 a.m. I dodged a bullet on this one simply by deciding not to trust the system. Of course I did not get my money back for the flight I did not take.
At least I had not bought phony “insurance.”
I’m certain you have your own stories. When my friends tell of air travel nightmares, I find myself becoming rather bored. I want to be sympathetic, but the problems are so routine now that they don’t excite much in the way of concern.
We are all watching this unfold, but no one seems to know what to do about it. The only people who truly benefit from all these failures are the airport bars and restaurants that have 50 percent premiums over normal food and drink because they can count on a captive and demoralized customer base. They are all making bank.
The rest of us are left with a feeling of demoralization, powerlessness, and the sadness that comes with being pillaged of time and money. It surely has the effect of making people less willing to take the risk at all. Better to hop on the train or drive the distance. Isn’t that such a strange thing? We figured we would have flying cars by now, but in fact we are lucky if even the planes fly.
Let’s say we have a fantastic Secretary of Transportation who seeks to fix the problems. What is their source? Experts point to shortages of workers. The vaccine mandates for pilots caused a wave of firings and early retirements. Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the corporate world have punished competence and elevated incompetence. Supply chains all broke in 2020, and they are yet to be fixed.
Regulatory impositions are so extreme that compliance in the name of safety is enormously costly. AI and computers are running everything these days, and no one really controls them. But even so, if the wrong light is on, the airline cannot take off. Weather-related delays have cascading effects throughout the country such that a slight drizzle in Chicago means delays in California and Florida. This is true because flights are booked and filled for maximum revenue rather than customer service.
In other words, there are so many deep and structural problems in this industry, it becomes difficult even to know where to begin to fix it. It is doubtful that a smart man at the top could do much of anything other than appoint a commission. And we know where that ends up: a big report that lands on desks and nothing happens.
Above a certain income level, a main consumer service to which the rich have access is the private chartered flight. These evade all the strictures over security and delays and much more. It also means that many of America’s most powerful people have no particular concern for this problem and no incentive to fix it.
What is more symptomatic of the general sense of decline than flight delays and cancellations? They seem to be getting much worse more quickly. For now, the train is infinitely more reliable. For now.
