Salon :: Tech & Business

Ask the Pilot: Tired of long delays? Look at the bright side of flying: It's cheaper and more accessible than ever

As the airlines announce their highest-ever load factors (percentage of seats sold), 2007 clocks in as the most delay-plagued year in aviation history. The past few months in particular have been excruciating, with bottlenecks victimizing tens of millions of fliers. The problem has not gone unnoticed by the media, major and minor. It seems that every last reporter and pundit, at every outlet from the Christian Science Monitor to National Public Radio, has run a feature story on the country's ever-worsening air traffic crisis. <P>Up to now these stories have mostly been missing the point, failing to show that the real culprit here isn't summer thunderstorms or faulty air traffic control equipment; it's the airline industry's obsession with pumping more and more airplanes -- particularly smaller regional jets (RJs) -- into an already saturated system. At long last, some of the coverage is getting it right. Namely, I refer you to Scott McCartney's excellent report, "Small Jets, More Trips Worsen Airport Delays," in the Aug. 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal. McCartney, author of the paper's "Middle Seat" business <a href="http://dir.salon.com/topics/travel/">travel</a> column, examines the airlines' untenable fixation with frequency. Even with a greater number of people flying than ever before, the size of the average <a href="http://dir.salon.com/topics/airplanes/">aircraft</a> has been shrinking. That means more takeoffs, more landings, more gridlock. The average jetliner now has 137 seats -- 23 fewer than it did five years ago. The use of RJs, which carry anywhere from 35 to 70 passengers, has increased nearly 200 percent in that span. <p>...</p><img src="http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/tech/~4/145252669" height="1" width="1"/>

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