Travel always heats up in the summer. Here are 5 of this year's biggest potential headaches for airline passengers.
Summer is supposed to be the perfect time to travel. The kids are out of school, and “summer Fridays” and holiday weekends make shorter trips tempting. Unfortunately, this is also the season when airline passengers can expect some of the most frustrating travel experiences.
A summer thunderstorm shouldn’t surprise airlines. But recently, storms have been “more severe and have been occurring in historically unusual places,” Mann told MarketWatch. “‘Because of delays, crew members run out of time … and that creates huge problems for the passengers and everybody else.’” In anticipation of these problems, he said, airlines often cancel large numbers of flights — “and again, that creates huge problems for the passengers and everybody else.”2. Your plane is too heavy, and you — or your bags — get left behind Even when there are no thunderstorms, if it’s hot and humid, some passengers may be in for a surprise when they are not allowed to board their plane.
As Smith wrote in his book: “Some aircraft have absolute temperature limits set by the manufacturer. These limits tend to be quite high, at around 122 degrees F, but every once in a while, it does get that hot, and flights are grounded outright.” And the three New York airports are part of a larger area of congestion that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C. That area includes Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport in Providence; Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn.; Philadelphia International Airport, which is another hub for American Airlines; Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport; and Dulles International Airport in Virginia, which is also a United Airlines hub.
— Patrick Smith “A plane is a plane, and they have to be spaced apart — whether it’s a business jet or a Boeing BA 777,” Smith said. “There are too many airplanes in New York and it’s a system that can’t handle it. You have a large number of very busy airports, and you don’t have that anywhere else in the world.”
4. Airline consolidation can turn a problem into a meltdown Changes to the aviation industry over the past few decades have made for more frustrating experiences for passengers. Prior to that wave of consolation, airlines were a lot more willing to work with each other, Mann said. He noted that, when he was an executive, he could ask other airlines to transport passengers who were stranded when his company’s flights were canceled. But that doesn’t happen anymore.
A spokesperson for Southwest told MarketWatch that the airline’s policy is to “rebook the traveler on the next available Southwest Airlines flight to their destination.”“In the old days, you had mainline planes and commuter planes, which flew at low altitudes and connected major hubs with outlying cities,” Smith said. “You didn’t have regional jets with fewer than 100 seats flying hub to hub or from Newark to Detroit.
Aimer noted that United has superhubs in Newark, Denver, San Francisco, Houston, Washington and Chicago. “If any of these airports are affected by weather, you have hundreds of flights that affect the rest of the country,” he said. “No one has been able to overcome all these issues when there’s a weather delay anywhere in the country.”
The FAA also warned Congress in a letter earlier this year that mandated spending cuts would “halt controller training and new hiring,” hurting air-traffic-control efforts down the line. “The number of flights these days — they’ve doubled and tripled and quadrupled from the old days,” Aimer said. “And each day the demand grows. Airlines are playing catch-up. They need airplanes. They need crews. They need ground staff. United, for example, has huge expansion plans, and the only thing that keeps them from achieving those plans is having personnel and aircraft.”
But no matter how many workers there are, there is little that frontline employees — from pilots to gate agents to customer-service representatives — can do when problems happen. According to data from the FAA, the past 12 months have seen the number of unruly passengers level off at between 130 and 170 per month. On average, that comes out to between 1.5 and 2.5 incidents per 10,000 flights.
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