WASHINGTON — The holidays brought no respite to air travelers such as Sean Fox.
Delta Air Lines misplaced Fox’s bags for a day after his arrival in South America on Dec. 22. On his return trip, his flight from Atlanta to Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport arrived 90 minutes late on Sunday. The airline misplaced his bag again. He didn’t get it back until late the next day.
Fox, a Washington-based consultant who racks up more than 100,000 frequent-flier miles a year, said he wasn’t surprised that his holiday travels were so frustrating. “It was just icing on the cake for a terrible year,” he said Tuesday.
“I added up all the time I was delayed last year, and it was probably a week of my life,” he said. “I am annoyed. There is no other way to describe it. It just makes your blood boil.”
Fox wasn’t the only traveler to see travel plans run into trouble in recent weeks in what analysts called a microcosm of the problems that affected passengers across the country in 2007: increasing flight delays, millions of lost bags and planes that have never been so packed.
Through October, flights operated by the top 20 U.S. airlines arrived at least 15 minutes late or were canceled about 26 percent of the time — the second-worst performance since 1995, according the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Nationwide, carriers said 74 percent of flights arrived on time by late Tuesday afternoon, according to FlightStats, an aviation tracking service.
That performance was far better than on other recent days. On Sunday, the airlines posted an on-time arrival rate of 65 percent at the nation’s 35 busiest airports, with delayed flights arriving an average of 54 minutes late, according to preliminary data from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The airlines did worse on Friday and during the previous weekend, with only about 50 percent of flights arriving on time, the preliminary data showed.
The holiday delays were enough to make passengers sigh in resignation.
Kaitlin Hasseler’s connecting flight from Chicago to Grand Rapids was canceled, forcing her to drive three hours to reach her family in time for Christmas. Still, she took the cancellation in stride.
“It’s kind of a necessary hassle,” she said after arriving home at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on Monday. “That’s kind of my outlook. Delays are not an uncommon part of traveling. So it’s a good lesson in patience. You learn to sit a lot.”
Over Thanksgiving, Andy Litsky got caught in such a long delay at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport that he “purged it” from his memory, he said.
Over Christmas, he decided to avoid the airlines and hopped on a bus to New York instead.
“I put on my jeans, kicked back and left the driving to them,” said Litsky, a consultant who lives in Southwest Washington. “My trip was just under 4.5 hours — portal to portal. No security lines, no fuel surcharge.”
The airlines, FAA officials and outside experts blamed bad weather for many of the delays in recent weeks, especially at airports in Chicago, Atlanta and New York.
Despite government and FlightStats statistics that generally showed below-average on-time performance this holiday season, airline representatives said the delays were not so bad.
“Operations have run relatively smoothly with exception of some pockets of weather,” said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group in Washington. “We have not seen system-wide paralysis. It’s relative. We would love to have our flights operate on-time 100 percent of time. This could have been far worse.”
Weather accounted for about 40 percent of flight delays nationwide during the first 10 months of the year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
But analysts, airline executives and government officials blame a slew of other reasons for declining on-time performance.
The airlines have run more flights, especially at congested airports, in recent years. There are more passengers and baggage on increasingly crowded planes — a trend that makes it difficult for carriers to quickly recover when problems arise.
An old air traffic control system is struggling to keep up with demand. Layoffs during the airlines’ economic meltdown a few years ago have also made it difficult, to including longer delays and even more lost bags, according to analysts.
Delays blamed on airlines carriers have increased about 6 million minutes since 2005, according to federal data.
Carriers lost or mishandled 3.7 million bags, or 7.1 bags per 1,000 passengers, during the first 10 months of 2007 — up from 3.3 million bags or 6.6 pieces of luggage per 1,000 passengers during the comparable period in 2006, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Some aviation analysts expect on-time performance to continue to slip this year.
“By the next major travel season, we hope the airlines have learned a lesson” about proper staffing and scheduling, said Dean Headley, a Wichita State University professor and co-author of the 2007 Airline Quality Rating. “But that is not typically what airlines do.
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