Ultra-long tarmac waits tripled in June as industry stats hit new lows

If air travel woes were bad during the first five months of this year – and they were – they got even worse in June, according to the latest monthly numbers from the Transportation Department. Overall, the airlines’ on-time arrival rate in June was just over 68 percent, down from 73 percent for the same month a year ago. For the first six months of 2007, roughly one flight in four arrived more than 15 minutes behind schedule, DOT said – the worst performance in 13 years of record-keeping. Perhaps even more troubling were the numbers for extremely long takeoff delays: Some 462 flights sat on the ground for more than three hours during June, more than three times as many as in May. As if that weren’t bad enough, flight cancellations in June hit a rate of 2.7 percent of all flights, up from 1.1 percent in May. And during the second quarter of 2007, the number of “involuntary denied boardings” (i.e. bumpings) reached 1.22 per 10,000 passengers, up from 1.12 a year earlier. Delta regional partner Atlantic Southeast had the worst on-time record in June at 56 percent. Among major airlines, American topped the late-arrivals list with 58 percent on-time, while US Airways recorded a 62 percent on-time rate.


Last week’s major incident for frazzled flyers came on Saturday (August 11), when several thousand international arrivals at Los Angeles International got backed up on the wrong side of the Customs/Immigration checkpoints. It seems that a government computer relied on by Immigration agents to check IDs went down, so no one could proceed through once they got off their flights. It got so bad that there was no room left in the terminals to accommodate the backlog of bodies, so passengers on some flights had to stay on their aircraft after landing. The whole mess took several hours to straighten out.