The Madding Crowd At The Airport

So there is a back story here:

But there are bigger things going on, frankly. Speaking of Alan Levin, maybe you caught his front-page story earlier this week on the nightly tarmac gridlock at Kennedy airport. The situation at JFK has reached a breaking point, and it is symptomatic of a nationwide crisis. Maybe Levin was distracted by 787 fever, but like almost everyone else who has written about the worsening problem of congestion and delays, he neglects to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the hundreds of small regional planes -- those "Express" and "Connection" code-share flights -- that are jockeying for space, both on the ground and aloft, with larger planes.

These code-share arrangements have been around for decades but have spread tremendously in recent years thanks to the advent of fast and efficient regional jets, or RJs. Their small size and large numbers add up to a disproportionate impact on traffic flow. From an airspace point of view, a plane is a plane is a plane, regardless of how many chairs are on board. At some airports, regionals make up half of total traffic while carrying only a quarter of the passengers. Not to hammer this topic more than is due -- we gave it a good going over back in June -- but with summer delays at record levels it's worth reiterating, particularly since neither the carriers nor the FAA seem interested in taking the matter seriously, choosing instead to blame "weather" and air-traffic-control equipment shortcomings for what in truth is an airline scheduling issue.

I recently returned to airline flying after a nearly six-year hiatus. Obviously the business has been transformed since 2001, from security to salaries, but two unpleasant changes have jumped out at me.

First is the weather. This is wholly anecdotal and by no means a scientific observation, but the number and strength of thunderstorms and convective activity seem drastically worse than in years past. This is especially true in and around the crowded Northeast corridor. I spent several years based in New York and Boston in the early and mid-1990s. Summer thunderstorms were at worst an occasional, maybe weekly occurrence. Now they are hitting almost every afternoon, with lines of majestically sculpted cumulonimbus clouds ripping through New England as if it were tropical Africa.

Regardless of what is or isn't causing this climatic weirdness, its impact wouldn't be half so bad if not for the staggering volume of air traffic attempting to navigate through and around it. I've never seen anything like it. Long waits and holding patterns are routine now, even on clear sunny days. And an ever-growing percentage of that traffic is made up of regionals. Check out those evening conga lines at Kennedy, and you're liable to spot a 500-passenger Boeing 747 sandwiched between four 50-seaters. Elsewhere it's similar. At LaGuardia and Washington-National, the number of RJs and, to a lesser extent, turboprop feeder craft, is astonishing, often outnumbering the Boeings and Airbuses of the majors.

...Your attention please: With scattered exceptions, there is no such thing as a weather delay. They are traffic delays. Your flight was not late because of the weather. It was late because there are too many small airplanes carrying too few people, end of story.