Editorial: It’s time for airlines to wake up

Monday, March 19, 2001 | 9:33 a.m.

It is hoped that Congress' prodding last week gets the attention of the airlines, so they can help ease the overcrowding of flights at our nation's airports. Obviously one of the long-term solutions to chronic flight delays is to build more airport runways, which in turn should alleviate some of the congestion. The problem is that this can't be done immediately, which means that the airlines need to pick up some of the slack.

The frequency of airline flight delays has worsened with each passing year, so much so that last year more than one out of every four flights was either delayed or canceled. This can be attributed in part to the airlines' hub-and-spoke system of directing flights, which concentrates most of their planes at a single airport. This cuts maintenance and other costs, but also creates congestion and delays, which are headaches for passengers.

One option to reduce the congestion would be to lower the landing fees at the less-congested airports in order to entice airlines to start using them. While a carrot-and-stick approach is less confrontational, and more likely to get Congress' blessing, it's not clear if fees could be lowered enough to get airlines to leave the profitable hub system. As Transportation Department Inspector General Kenneth Mead testified before Congress, a change more likely would occur if there were higher landing fees at peak times.

Fortunately in the past two years Congress has increased its interest in improving the airlines' performance. Since most members of Congress fly home every weekend, undoubtedly part of their enthusiasm could be traced to self-interest. Still, the fact is that the delays affect millions of travelers every year. Sometimes the delays can leave tourists seething, since they lose hours, even a day, of vacation time. Companies' productivity also can be hurt when their employees on business trips sit stranded in airports. The airlines need to quickly devise a plan to reduce the out-of-control delays that are plaguing the system. A failure to act quickly could force Congress' hand to impose controls that, in the end, could hurt them financially.