Big headaches thanks to the Big Apple
While it pains us to keep sharing bad news about flying commercial, we consider it something of our sacred duty to do so. Let’s face it, the crappy commercial flight situation is perhaps the biggest reason many of us are considering fractional jet ownership. The cover story of the November 12 New York magazine presents some interesting and, yes, disturbing, facts.We all know that one of the world’s hottest spots in terms of both business and pleasure is the Big Apple. Yet the area’s three major airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark) hold the worst three spots of all major American airports when it comes to on-time arrival. Getting off the ground doesn’t come much easier. In fact, JFK is worst among the 32 major airports. Newark is #30, and LaGuardia #25.
What makes this even worse is the ripple effect. As noted in the article:
Close to 3,700 flights stream through our three airports daily. And our sluggishness infects the entire grid. “If you look at the delay signature in New York and on the national level, you can see it propagating delays into the national system,” says John Hansman, an MIT scientist who studies air-traffic patterns. When a tardy Kennedy flight finally makes it to a hub like O’Hare—already stretched thin itself—air-traffic controllers are forced to put other, more-punctual arrivals in holding patterns to accommodate the one that’s already outrageously late; the ensuing domino effect can mean missed connections and lost luggage from Seattle to Sarasota. According to Kevin Mitchell of the Business Travel Coalition, 75 percent of delays around the country originate in New York. Since only 33 percent of the total delays actually happen here, this means that every local delay triggers more than two delays elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the future doesn’t look much brighter. New York airports handled some 104 million fliers in 2006. According to the article, if growth trends prove true, the same airports will be processing (or trying to) about 150 million fliers come 2025.
One of the most interesting facts in the story has to do with the economics of landing fees:
One would think that the limitations of the system would telegraph something to the airlines—that it’s time to stop adding flights. No such luck. There are no mechanisms in place to regulate the number of planes carriers can schedule at JFK or Newark (La Guardia is capped at 62 to 64 planes an hour in bad weather). Neither is there an economic disincentive: Landing fees are cheap—$800 per flight for a large jet. So like all good capitalists, carriers take the silence of the law as an invitation to make as much money as possible. Passengers want options, and the airlines are in a veritable arms race to please them. This month, for instance, JetBlue offers fourteen daily flights to Fort Lauderdale (nine from JFK and five from La Guardia); Delta, trying to keep up, has nine. All told, there are an astounding 68 flights a day from New York’s three airports to Fort Lauderdale.
The ability to land at smaller airports, perhaps closer to one’s destination, and avoiding this sort of gridlock and madness is, for me, perhaps the most attractive part about fractional jet ownership.
