Why Flying Is Hell

It was supposed to be a quick trip. Sean Epstein, a 27-year-old marketing executive in New York, had to fly down to Washington in January for a morning training session with a client. Even though the flight is measured in minutes, he decided to leave the night before--just to be safe. But because of a series of delays, cancellations and fully booked flights, he embarked on an odyssey that took him through St. Louis, Charlotte, Baltimore. After 16 sleepless hours, Epstein finally arrived in Washington--late for his meeting and looking much the worse for wear. Epstein says he may start donning battle fatigues for his weekly business trips. "It's war,'' he says. "Isn't there a way to fix this mess?''

It's a good question, one that's likely to come up more often as we head into yet another travel season of long lines, short tempers, labor tension and packed planes. Last year about one of every four flights was delayed or canceled. Travel snafus are more than just an inconvenience; they're a drain on the economy, too. Some estimates put the cost of all the delayed and canceled flights at $5 billion a year--and that's probably a low figure. So NEWSWEEK set out in search of ways to fix air travel and, after asking the experts, came up with seven specific recommendations. The proposals range from cheap and easy, like finding ways to get airlines to pay more attention to customers, to expensive and hard, such as quickly adding some much-needed new runways at big-city airports.

There's a lot right about the current system. It's remarkably safe, reasonably affordable, and most people get to their destination on time and with their bags. Still, for many Americans, the hassles and exasperation at every stage of the trip have never seemed worse. Long lines at crowded airports. Grumpy airline workers. Delays at the gate. Fights for space in the overhead bins. More delays on the runway. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 57 percent of travelers say they think the experience of flying has gotten worse over the past five years. Their biggest beefs? Twenty-nine percent blame delayed flights, while 27 percent say cramped quarters on the plane is the worst thing about air travel. Yet a majority (59 percent) said they were not willing to pay more for better service.

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Who, and what, is to blame? In simplest terms, the busiest airports and the air-traffic-control system can't handle all the flights, and that leads to delays, the biggest cause of frustration. But start talking about solutions, and you run into another big problem: institutional gridlock. Sure, a lot of people act like they want change. Not a week goes by in Washington without another conference about aviation's troubles. And ever since Northwest's epic debacle in Detroit in 1999, with all those planes stuck on the runway in a snowstorm for more than eight hours, a favorite contact sport in the capital has been bashing the airlines with yet another legislative proposal designed to get them to shape up, once and for all.

But many powerful groups would actually prefer to keep things the way they are. Private pilots like having cheap access to the nation's airports and airspace. Bureaucrats and politicians resist changing the structure of the Federal Aviation Administration because their responsibilities might shrink. Even the major airlines, which routinely point fingers at the FAA for its inadequate air-traffic-control system, have an interest in maintaining the status quo. Air travel has become a scarce resource. That gives airlines leverage to adopt a my-way-or-the-highway approach to service, and to push up fares. If you have to fly at the last minute between, say, Boston and Los Angeles, be prepared to shell out about $2,000.

To break this impasse, the traveler in chief needs to get involved, and start jawboning the various interests into making compromises and reaching solutions. That's not likely to happen in the short term. Transportation problems don't usually grab the president's attention. "Somehow it never really gets to be a central focus of the radar screen,'' says Norman Y. Mineta, the Transportation secretary.

The costs are adding up. Executives who fear they might miss a meeting are leaving a day earlier, adding hotel and meal costs to their expensive plane tickets. Kevin Berg, president of a Chicago marketing firm, figures he spends up to $15,000 more a year on travel than he needs to just to make sure he doesn't miss key appointments. "You blow an enormous amount of valuable time, and you just don't have any control over it,'' he says. Corporations are even willing to pay for more expensive direct flights these days, rather than risk having their staffers caught between connecting flights.

It's only going to get more unpleasant as the peak travel season heats up. Airline labor groups--including pilots at Delta--are demanding huge raises and may go on strike. Even if these storm clouds clear, others are on the way. The U.S. aviation system, which handles more than 650 million passengers a year, will be strained further as traffic rises more than 50 percent in about a decade, according to FAA forecasts. "The silver lining is that it's going to get much, much worse,'' says Darryl Jenkins, director of the Aviation Safety and Security Institute, which offers graduate programs in airline management at George Washington University. "Then changes will simply have to occur.''

Come the day that doing nothing is no longer a tolerable option, what should be done? You'll find some answers on the following pages.