Wasting Time and Money on the Tarmac
Air travel delays hurting economy
By Ben Dachis

It seems that no matter where Americans try to go these days, congestion always stands in their way. Whether trying to get to work, school or the mall, American drivers face congested roads.

Now, a new source of congestion is arising for American travelers: airports. Nearly anyone who has traveled by plane over the last few years has been there, idly sitting in an airplane waiting to takeoff or waiting for a gate to become free at the terminal after landing. These needless delays cost the American economy over $10 billion per year.

The holiday season is one of busiest travel times of the year, and airline passengers across the country can expect to spend plenty of time sitting on the tarmac when they could be visiting with their families, getting ready for the big meal.

These delays impose a major economic cost for airlines and passengers. Airplanes sitting on the ground burn valuable fuel; wastefully emit pollution and carbon dioxide; and airline crews must be paid regardless of whether the plane is in the air or on the ground. The Air Transport Association estimates that each minute of delay costs airlines $68. As fuel gets more and more expensive, this number climbs ever higher.

Any extra cost incurred by airlines is inevitably passed onto consumers through either higher ticket costs or fewer flight options due to fewer profitable flights.

Passenger time is also very valuable, and few can imagine more wasteful time than sitting on a plane waiting to take off, especially since during taxiing people cannot use their phones, computers or other electronics that make them more productive (or keep them entertained).

Putting numbers on the cost of delays places the airport congestion problem into context. While delays on the road cost the country upwards of $78 billion according to the Texas Transportation Institute, the money wasted by airlines sitting on the tarmac was over $6.2 billion in 2006 by my estimates.

A total of 770 million minutes were needlessly wasted by passengers sitting in airplanes waiting to depart or come to the gate last year. That's nearly 150 years of passenger time wasted.

Using standard values of passenger time cost pushes the total national economic cost (to airlines and passengers) of idly sitting on airport tarmac to around $10 billion per year.

Nowhere has the airport congestion problem been worse than the three major airports in New York City. The situation on the roads there is already bad, costing approximately $7.4 billion per year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

Congestion at the airports was also very costly to the New York economy in 2006, costing over $1.2 billion in increased airline costs and wasted passenger time at John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports combined.

Surely, the figures for 2007 will be even higher than this, and the future does not bode well for New York if nothing is done about the congestion problem at these major airports.

These numbers likely only scratch the surface of the cost of all delays due to congestion, as this estimate doesn't include the removal of otherwise profitable flights by airlines and passengers who don't travel because of delays, nor does it include the padding of airline schedules to include "routine" delays, or delays in arrival of flights that departed on time.

The primary cause of these delays is that airlines are over-scheduling flights at congested airports. If an airport cannot safely handle more than 20 departures in 15 minutes and the airlines have scheduled 25, something's got to give. Air traffic controllers have no choice but to force some airplanes to wait while other aircraft before them depart.

Blaming the weather will soon no longer be a credible defense for airlines. New satellite technologies to help aircraft more accurately and safely navigate past stormy weather should make schedules impervious to anything but extreme weather.

Some have proposed instituting a Passenger Bill of Rights that mandates compensation for passengers due to delays. However, this only addresses the consequences, not the cause, of severe airport delays.

The solution to the problem is to incentivize airlines to schedule their operations so that they do not all schedule their flights at the same time. A congestion price that rises with the demand for departures would solve this problem and should be considered instead of the mandatory caps that the FAA is proposing for JFK.

As with roads, congestion should not be seen as inevitable at airports. A practical solution involving basic market principles could drastically reduce the huge economic costs of delays.

Ben Dachis is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation. Reason's air traffic research and commentary is available here.

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