More than 26% of last year’s flights late. Blame congested skies

by Iva Skoch on

As far as airline delays go, 2007 was the second worst year ever, with over a quarter of all US flights arriving late. In December, more than one third of all flights arrived late. Only 2000 was worse, with over 27%.

Rising passenger demand and an industry preference for smaller planes causing congestion in the skies and on runways is to blame, AP reports. Experts say that flight delays will be getting increasingly more common. There is no hope for improvement anytime soon, because airlines continue to replace large planes with smaller ones in order to maximize profit margins by flying with fewer empty seats.

We can expect, once again, that the airlines will just adjust their flights times. If you tell passengers upfront that a flight from Boston to DC takes 4 hours (although it should only take about 1 hour) and you get them there in 4 hours, there is–technically speaking–no delay.

(Photo: NASA – Day In the Life of Air Traffic Over the United States)

Cockpit Chronicles: Miami Closed? You’re pulling my leg!

by Kent Wien on

Occasionally international pilots at our company will fly domestic trips, and a Miami turn I had on my schedule last week is a good example of that. Fly down and an hour later, come back to Boston. When you live somewhat close to the airport, these trips are a great way to avoid being away from home so much.

It would also give me a chance to fly with a domestic captain, Frank, who I had never flown with before. This can be good or bad, since you have no idea what kind of personality you’ll be sitting next to for the next 7 hours. Most captains I’ve flown with can be grouped into five different personalities:

• The quiet type – who manages a few words an hour.

• The thinker– who engages you with conversation about the industry or politics and keeps you pondering the future, asking questions like, “Do you think people are genetically predisposed to favor monarchies over democracies?”

• The grump– who can’t come up with anything positive to say about the day.

• The comedian– who keeps you smiling for the entire trip.

Or

• The control freak– who makes sure that his method of flying becomes YOUR method of flying.

Fortunately in our base we have very few grumps or control freaks. I’m not sure if that ratio holds up at the other bases or not.

For this one-day trip to Miami, I really lucked out. Captain Frank is a comedian. There wasn’t anything subtle about his sense of humor, as this example shows:

Often a captain will turn to ask at some point in the preflight what leg a co-pilot prefers. That is to say, which leg of a flight would they wold like to fly the aircraft while the other pilot talks on the radio. Once this is decided at the beginning of a trip, we usually trade off the flying duties for the rest of the legs. The decision as to who starts off is really up to the captain — as is the choice of meals — but if the he has no preference he may defer the choice to the co-pilot. Frank’s method of asking this question is by pulling out a plastic leg from what I presume was a very chubby doll and saying, “Whose leg is this?” with a puzzled look.

I couldn’t think of a better way to start off a trip than this. It tends to break the ice and makes for a fun day. And a fun day we had.

Halfway into the flight, I was coming back to the cockpit after using the restroom when Frank announced, “The Miami Airport is closed.”

“Yeah, Right.” That Frank is pretty funny, I thought.

“No, it really is. It’s completely fogged in,” he said, pointing to the ATIS (the current airport weather report) that we can print up inflight.

Sure enough, Miami was socked in. The second picture above shows the visibility in feet at the touchdown, midfield and roll out areas on each runway. We commented on how rare of an event this was, since neither of us had actually seen fog in Miami in our careers. It’s so rare, in fact, that the Miami airport doesn’t have an approach system called a CAT III ILS which would allow us to land by using the airplane’s autopilot down to visibilities as low as 500 feet.

So we had to enter yet another holding pattern just abeam Fort Lauderdale while we waited for the fog to clear. Fortunately we had plenty of fuel and we could literally see the FLL airport next to us, which was clear.

We did some quick calculations to figure that we could hold for more than 50 minutes given our current fuel before we would be burning into the reserve needed to go to our furthest alternate airport, fly the approach and still have 45 minutes to play with.

The next calculation was if this extra flight time was going to cause me to exceed 30 hours of flight time in 7 days, which would cause me to lose the three day London trip scheduled the next day. I might have been able to find another trip to pick up, but I had already made plans for the long layover in England. It took just a little bit of adding to discover that I wasn’t going to lose any flying the next day.

The Miami airport opened up after thirty minutes. By the time it was our turn to land, the fog had completely lifted and we were sure that passengers would question the reason for the late arrival. While that wasn’t the case, we did have a couple of people complain, one even saying, “I refuse to say thanks since you got us here late.”

I couldn’t help thinking that we could have certainly got him on the ground on time, only it would have been at the Fort Lauderdale airport.

After this trip, I’ve added Frank to my list of captains that I’ll go out of my way to fly with. Thanks, Frank, for making the day such a pleasure. And thanks to the passengers who understand that we don’t really have much control over the weather.

Cockpit Chronicles takes you along on each of Kent’s trips as a co-pilot on the Boeing 757 and 767 out of Boston.

It’s Official. Heathrow is Shabby and Slow.

by Grant Martin on

Not only is Heathrow one of the world’s drabbest airports, it also has more flight delays than any other major airport in Europe. According to statistics from the Association of European Airlines, from April to June one flight in three left Heathrow at least than 15 minutes late, with many flights departing at least than half an hour late.

The most efficient airport was Brussels where the well-organised Belgians ensured only 15.5% of flights were delayed. Further east in Cyprus, the laid back crew at Lanarca airport had 27.6% of flights delayed, but with a massive 55 minutes average waiting time.

My own personal best (worst?) was a couple of hours waiting at Panama City’s domestic gateway, Marcos A. Gelabert Airport for a flight to the San Blas islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast. The official reason given was poor weather, but I’m still adamant the flight crew were waiting for the 2006 Champions League Final between Arsenal and Barcelona to finish. When extra time was required we were never going to leave on time.

News via the www.telegraph.co.uk and thanks to d’n’c on Flickr for the photo of my least favourite London bed and breakfast.

Also be sure and check the London destination guide.

Chinese Buffet – Part 20: An Air China Ending

by Kelly Amabile on

This is the final installment of the 20-part Chinese Buffet series that chronicled the travels of an American woman visiting China for the first time.

Before I begin this story, let me clarify that the airline I write about in this post is Air China, and NOT China Airlines, which has been in the news this week for its frightening runway explosion. However, it should be noted that Air China has received its own share of bad press in recent weeks too.

I had read some of that unsettling news just days before I boarded an Air China flight to Beijing in early July. I was a little leery, but too eager about my trip to lose any sleep over it.

The flight to China on CA982 was fine — once we got off the ground. We were held on the runway at JFK for almost an hour before taking-off, but I blame that on the airport and not the airline.

Three weeks later, I took another Air China flight to leave the country, and this time, it was the airline’s fault that we did not depart on time.

I was headed to Melbourne, Australia. A one-way ticket on Air China was the cheapest I could find without having to make three or four plane changes. In fact, CA177 was a direct overnight flight — ten hours straight to my destination while I slept.

Too good to be true, huh?

I should have been on alert after my ticket purchase fiasco a few weeks prior: I booked over the phone, and arranged for an Air China messenger to deliver the paper ticket to where I was staying in Shanghai. There was no e-ticket option available, so the messenger also brought a credit card machine so we could complete the sale on the spot. That proved to be quite an ordeal, since he could not get a signal for the portable machine, and subsequently spent an hour walking around the parking lot of the Green Court apartments in Pudong trying to get the transaction to go through. After several phone calls and lots of pacing, the sale was eventually completed.

I didn’t want to admit it, but this seemed a warning sign that things might not go smoothly. If it was this complicated to buy an airline ticket in China, what was to be expected at the airport and on the flight?

Uh….this:

I showed up at Pudong International about 3:30 pm on August 1. The flight was supposed to start boarding at 5:30 and I think this sign (with the wrong airline name on it!) was posted at 6:30. “Mechanical Trouble” is so much worse than a bad weather or air traffic delay — suddenly there were a bazillion unknowns, and nothing to do but sit around and wonder about all of them while we waited for flight status updates.

In this case, no news was certainly NOT good news.

About an hour later, with no further announcements, dinner was served! Passengers started lining up in the boarding area for dishes of warm rice and pork — the actual meals that we would have received on the plane:

At this point I was happy to have befriended a great gal from South Dakota (of all places!!!) named Emily. A photographer, world traveler and blogger too, Emily and I soon learned that we had much in common and plenty to talk about. Which was a wonderful distraction from the fact that we had no clue whether or not we’d be boarding a (possibly “malfunctioning”) airplane.

About an hour after they fed us, there was an announcement made in Chinese and everyone started to move. An airport staff woman approached Emily and I, explaining that, “The shuttle will now take you to the hotel.”

We were corralled back through immigration into China again, then bused off to our “Super 8 meets Motel 6” airport hotel:

Thank goodness I had a cool roommate that kept me laughing, and well-connected with her high-tech travel gear. Emily, who had recently moved to Shanghai, was headed to Sydney on a business trip (CA177 flies to Sydney after Melbourne), and was traveling with a GSM mobile and laptop. She let me borrow the phone to contact my friends in Australia, and use the web to shoot an email to family back home. We chatted about blogging, looked at each other’s photos online, and laughed at our freakishly similar sleeping attire — a Kodak moment, no doubt:

The only instructions we received from the hotel staff was to stay put in our rooms and wait for a call in the morning to return to the airport. Needless to say, I did not sleep well and was on alert when the call finally came at 6:30 am:

“Hello, please come quickly! The buses will leave for airport at 6:30!!”

I looked out the window to see folks already boarding bus number one. We frantically gathered our belongings and hopped on the third shuttle bus within ten minutes. Back at the airport, we then went through immigration again and resumed the waiting game. They directed us back to the same gate where the same “mechanical troubles” sign still stood.

It was hard to tell if I was uninformed because of the language barrier, or because Air China was keeping us in the dark about what was going on. I think it was a bit of both, because I definitely saw Chinese passengers complaining and asking questions. I just had no clue as to the specifics of the scenario.

Eventually, boarding began, and as passengers went through, an Air China official gave each person 500 RMB as compensation for their troubles. But lots of people were still not happy — there was all sorts of discontent among the crowd. We asked for someone to translate. Folks were questioning the safety of the plane, demanding more money back and refusing to board.

Although I too had my concerns about the safety of the plane, I was not interested in hanging out with an angry airport mob. I figured that if the pilot was willing to fly it, the plane must be in good condition. I had to believe it was safe to fly. So I boarded, and spent two hours watching these guys remove luggage from the cargo bin for passengers who had decided not to go through with the flight. It was all quite nerve-racking…

And I had lost my new buddy too! Emily and I parted ways when I chose to get on the plane and she called off her business trip to Australia. There was no longer any point in waiting to see when the flight might leave — she’d never make her meeting in Sydney on time.

I think it was sometime around 1 pm when we finally departed. For much of the flight, I fought off a nagging fear that the “mechanical troubles” would return. It was the first time I’ve ever felt afraid to fly, and at one point I did breakdown and shed a few tears of exhaustion. I ate very little of my last Chinese meal since nerves had by now wreaked havoc on my stomach.

But I love flying, and this experience hasn’t changed my opinion. Although I felt clueless throughout much of the delay, Air China did “take care of us” to some degree — they fed us, gave us a place to stay, and efficiently transported us to and from the airport hotel. I sat next to a Chinese man on the flight who was angry that other Chinese passengers refused to board without additional compensation. He was right, it was frustrating — we would have departed much earlier if these folks had not held out for more money. (In the end we each got 800 RMB for our troubles.)

Last I heard from Emily, she was still trying to get a refund for her ticket from Air China. You can read her version of our adventure here. (Be sure to look at the funny Chinglish signs from our motel room!)

After those flying solo tears were done, I took some deep breaths and selected a movie for my viewing pleasure. This delayed departure from China could have happened in any country — it was not a uniquely Chinese experience. Although, I sensed something orderly about the chaos of the airplane debacle that had surfaced at other moments during my three weeks in the country.

It’s challenging to find the right words to close with — because this was simply an introduction, an overview, an appetizer. I left China slightly frazzled, but satisfied with my first look at the PRC. I suspect that so much will change before I return (even if it’s just a year or two from now!), that it might feel like an introduction all over again, the second time around.

Band on the Run: Trippin’ in O’Hare Airport

by Ember Swift on

Ember Swift, Canadian musician and touring performer, will be keeping us up-to-date on what it’s like to tour a band throughout North America. Having just arrived back from Beijing where she spent three months (check out her “Canadian in Beijing” series), she offers a musician’s perspective on road life. Enjoy!

One of the big things that travellers often worry about is how to stay in shape while going from plane to highway back to airport to waiting room to plane to highway, etc. There’s a lot of sitting involved in travelling, especially when you’re going long distances, and sometimes it feels to me (someone who likes to run as my choice of exercise) that I am completely sedentary and blob-like for far too long.

Unless, of course, I am routed through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL.

I’ve heard that this is the largest airport in North America in terms of square footage, but I’m having trouble supporting that with any source. Has anyone else ever heard that? I did learn that it is the second busiest airport in the U.S. and the second busiest in the world with over 76 million travellers through the airport in the year 2006. (source) Because so many flights come in and out of Chicago, there seems to be no logical reason for the placement of connections. They’re sometimes a full half-hour walk away and with delays, inclement weather and general O’Hare confusion, it’s not uncommon to miss one’s connection at this airport.

Even if you’re a runner.

This must be the largest airport in North America because I think I have walked the whole thing several times and I’ve had the blisters to prove it. I know now that being routed through Chicago will cure the “feeling-like-a-blob” blues. Especially today, when I had ten minutes to make it between terminal B and terminal C and had to basically run and walk at the same time while dragging my luggage and fellow travellers behind me.

There’s a causeway between these two terminals that amuses me. It’s designed like an eighties nightclub with neon tube lighting zigzagging across the ceiling and overall dim lighting in the tunnel to enhance their dance. They flip on and off like they’re on a slow strobe and the adjoining mirrors give the impression that there are even more lights going on than there are.

I know this is the airport’s attempt to install art in between the monotonous transfer between flights, but little did they know that they not only gave us a visual experience here, but they gave us a temporary exit from reality; an experiential gateway into what feels like another dimension.

An essential partner to this installation is the moving sidewalk that is installed here – two lengths of it – and perhaps you know what I’m talking about when I call these devices “trippy.” By this, I mean that it sometimes feels like I’m in another state of consciousness when I’m on them, especially if I’m also walking down them (not just letting them carry me) like I was doing today in my attempt to make the connecting flight. It is dream-like, as though you’re part floating and walking while also being swept across the floor towards the other end the way a camera zooms in and takes your eye with it without your consent.

Just head towards the light.

So put them together with the neon lights and it’s even more trippy. It suddenly makes me feel as though I’m under the influence of a reality-shifting drug and squashed into an all-ages travellers’ nightclub at which carry-on luggage is mandatory fashion. It was all I could do to stay focused and keep walking today without letting myself get lost in the colours.

I made it out the other side without disappearing into the illusion of it all, I’m proud to say. And, I also made my connection. The flight attendants with their colourful leis and big smiles had held the plane for the various delays that had already rippled their way across the entire airport. Our flight left about forty-five minutes after the schedule departure time, so I’m hoping that they also found the time to put our luggage on the same plane as our bodies. I guess we’ll find out when we land.

Maui, here I come.

I once had to stay overnight in Chicago because the President of your country down there had decided to spontaneously come to Chicago that day. This, of course, delayed all the flights (for security reasons) and made hundreds of people miss their connections. In fact, this was the information that we received from the Canadian aircraft that we were flying on because they had to delay their landing and do an extra loop around the city.

When we arrived at O’Hare, they told us that the delay was as a result of “inclement weather.” When I told these conflicting explanations to my friend in Chicago (who I phoned during my long attempt to find an alternative means home before giving up and heading for a hotel), she said: “The weather was perfect today here! And, yeah, the president was here too. They’re all such liars. They lie as easily about bombs as they do about the weather. What a joke!” I just sighed and didn’t feel any less helpless in the circumstance. I simply became part of a herd of discontented people forced to pay overpriced hotel fees and grumble under our breath about injustice.

(I did have some of the best vegan pizza that night that I’ve ever eaten. So, it wasn’t all that bad.)

Before the hotel decision, however, we had walked the whole of O’Hare airport being told to try various flights for openings to get us back to Canada. I believe that day that we walked a total of ten kilometres.

I think it was after that experience that I invested in carry-on luggage with wheels.

After O’Hare, I’m always happy to sit down again. Even if it’s in a plane while squashed into economy seating.

Now if only they could improve the lighting in the actual cabin. I’d love an optical illusion or two for such a long flight. I have many hours to go now.

Hawaii. Ten hours. Too much perfume. No vegetarian fare.

Where’s the flashing neon when you need it?