Hubbub

Charles Dudley Warner said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." “Nobody” would seem to include the airlines. If you remember my blog entry entitled Airline Deregulation -- Again you might remember I said, “A 100-airplane -an-hour airport can’t accept but 100 airplanes an hour. (We won’t talk about weather -- for now.)” Well, now is a good time to talk about the weather.

My recent vacation was a retirement present for my wife -- a cruise in the Caribbean. Not to confuse you -- I retired. She got the cruise. And she deserved it. But that is another story. The first night we went to dinner, looking forward to meeting whoever would be sharing our dining room table. No one was there. They weren’t there on the second night, nor the third. Finally, they showed up on the fourth night. It turns out, they’d been frozen in at JFK during the Jet Blue fiasco on Valentine’s Day.

The weather had taken a 100-airplane-an-hour airport and turned it into a zero-airplane-per-hour airport. Congratulations Jet Blue. You’ve made it to the long and distinguished list of airline deregulation, hub-induced disasters.

Let’s step back in time, 30 days before this fiasco. Do you think the smart guys at Jet Blue that sell tickets were thinking about the weather ? I kind of doubt it. Even if they were, everybody knows the weather is unpredictable. Weather-induced delays, however, are predictable. I predict that by June, you will be reading about thunderstorm-induced delays. See how easy that was ?

The point is, weather happens. Ice covered airplanes don’t fly. They crash. Airplanes can’t fly in severe thunderstorms for the same reason. And nothing that the airlines have designed handles weather as poorly as a Hub.

An airline hub looks great on paper. It’s the model of efficiency. The idea behind a hub is to dominate an airport. I could talk about Delta in Atlanta (or United in ORD, or American in DFW, ad nausem) but let’s stick with Jet Blue in JFK. They concentrate their infrastructure to achieve economies of scale. Once that is done, they will fight for every passenger that uses that airport.

Sticking with our 100-airplanes-an-hour airport, the airline isn’t going to only take 70 of those landing slots and leave 30 for their competitors. They want all 100 slots. Of course, in today’s deregulated market, they can take all 100 (or 120) and their competitors can still add 30 airplanes an hour. That is the reason you have delays even on days with perfect weather. Bad weather (ice, snow, winds, clouds and thunderstorms) just turns a bad situation into a disaster.

I read an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today that set me off on this tirade. In an article talking about the 7,000+ flights that sat on the airport concrete for over two hours last year, I got to read this statement by a representative of the Air Transport Association (ATA.)

"Unfortunately, the number of delays is going to get worse before it gets better, until we transition to a satellite-based air traffic control system," Castelveter said.

Huh ? To steal a line from my own blog, “This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.” Air Traffic Control doesn’t control the weather, satellites or no satellites . Mr. Castelveter is just pushing the ATA thought that a bunch of satellites will allow ATC to move more airplanes more quickly. Unfortunately, he’s not only failing to make sense, he’s “wronger than wrong.” ATA can come up with whatever pie-in-sky scheme for ATC that they’d like. It won’t make a dime’s worth of difference (much less several billion dollar’s worth) if we can’t get them to the gates. You know, the gates at your hubs that are so overcrowded that the airlines can’t seem to get anybody off of an airplane -- even after 10 hours.

Hey, you don’t have to take my word for it that hubs are a disaster. Everybody knows that Southwest doesn’t use the hub system. Right ? This just in.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines had the best record among the large U.S. carriers, with 82 percent of flights on time.

Those that know me will believe this...those that don’t will just have to take my word for it (or not.) I didn’t think about the Southwest angle until I had typed all the above. I went to Goggle News, typed in +”Southwest Airlines” +Delays and this popped up, leading me to post the link.

“Timely arrivals drop for major airlines
Fort Worth Star Telegram, TX - 8 hours ago”

Gotta love the internet.

Don Brown
March 6, 2007