Perhaps it’s of little comfort, but the next time your airplane lands thirty minutes late,
remember the seventeenth-century clipper ships. No one ever expected them to deliver their loads of passengers and cargo on schedule; in fact, everyone rejoiced if a ship arrived in the right week or month—or even arrived at all. The point is that it’s relatively easy to keep airplanes flying, but it’s extremely difficult to keep them flying on schedule.
One of the biggest challenges to a firm schedule is the weather. No airline will fly its aircraft (or passengers) in a thunderstorm or hurricane, so teams of meterologists work around the clock to spot and predict wind conditions, precipitation, and anything else that could cause a delay around the globe. A storm in the Arctic could seriously hamper flights between New York and Hong Kong that fly near the North Pole. Warmer-than-average ocean currents could shift the position of high-altitude jet streams and add an hour to a cross-country flight.
Worst of all, a thunderstorm hovering over a major hub could cause disruptions around the world. Chicago’s O’Hare airport is the busiest airport in the world, with over 900,000 flights departing each year (Atlanta’s Hartsfield International is a close second); if it closes for six hours, flight schedules can be affected globally. After all, a jet leaving Chicago may be needed in Washington, D.C., so that it can take a flight to Los Angeles, and its captain can fly a
different jet to Buenos Aires. Most airlines have a rule: Always inconvenience the fewest
number of passengers. So if that flight to Los Angeles has 220 passengers, many of whom are making connecting flights to Australia and Asia, and there is another airplane flying from
Washington, D.C., to Denver with only 50 people on it, the airline may cancel the Denver flight and use the airplane to fly to Los Angeles instead. That’s why you may later hear an
announcement that your flight is delayed due to “weather,” even though it’s a beautiful day outside.
When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the airplane,
you ’ re ready to take off.
— Pilot ’ s saying
To avoid differences in time zones, everyone in the airline industry uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), or “Zulu” time (so called because “Zulu” designates the letter z , which
represents zero). UTC used to be called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) because it is based on the time in Greenwich, England—also the location of the prime meridian (zero degrees
longitude).
The same thing happens on a smaller scale when an aircraft has mechanical difficulties or if a passenger has a medical emergency and the aircraft has to reroute. Sometimes a long delay will push a landing time past an airport’s night curfew, and the flight has to be rerouted or canceled. Airlines can’t afford to keep extra $50-million airplanes around to fill in the gaps created by an unexpected delay, so even seemingly minor disruptions can cause ripples throughout the system.
Another, perhaps more infuriating reason for delays is that airlines regularly schedule more aircraft departures than some airports can actually safely accommodate. In many cases, airplanes leave the gate on time only to stand in a long line of other airplanes waiting for a
runway because on-time departure technically
means a plane leaving the gate on time, not necessarily taking off when it’s supposed to.
Of course, it’s always maddening to hear that your flight has been canceled, especially if the reason seems mysterious. The gate agents may announce a delay or cancellation due to mechanical problems (because that’s what the airline told them), but this doesn’t necessarily mean the problem was on that particular aircraft. There’s little doubt that some gate agents (or their superiors) lie to passengers to keep complaints down. After all, no passenger wants to hear, “The airline has decided it’s more economical to cancel your flight than to
inconvenience these other people.” More often than not, however, everyone is telling the truth
—or at least, as much of the truth as they know.
In the year 2000, the busiest airports in the world (in terms of airline departures) were in the cities of Atlanta (the home of Delta Airlines), Chicago O’Hare Airport (home of United Airlines), and Dallas/Fort Worth (home of American Airlines). The world’s busiest cargo hubs? In
Memphis, Tennessee (home of Federal Express), and Hong Kong.
In 1936, 1.1 million passengers flew on airplanes in the United States. By 1958, almost 49 million Americans were flying each year. In 1970, the number had increased to 170 million;
and in 2001, a whopping 622 million American passengers flew. (Since there are only about 275 million people in the United States, some folks flew more than once!)
To keep things flowing smoothly, every two hours in the United States, representatives from the major airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have a conference telephone call to discuss how things are going and what the airlines should expect in the next few hours:
weather concerns, delays, over-scheduling, and so on.
People Movers
Another giant challenge to maintaining an on-time schedule is the logistical nightmare of having the right crew on the right flights at the right time. Step into the central operations room of any large airline, and you’ll find almost 100 people whose job it is to track the
thousands of flight and ground crew employees. A rerouted flight may bump a pilot up against her maximum legal flight-hour limits, making it impossible for her to fly another leg of a trip. A flight attendant who calls in sick needs to be replaced in order for the flight to take off. A mechanical difficulty could strand pilots and attendants for hours in one city when they’re needed on flights elsewhere.
Flight crews (pilots and flight attendants) typically don’t remain on the same airplane, or even remain together as a team, for more than one or two legs of a flight. Instead, they are
individually routed from airport to airport, either working on a flight or flying as a passenger,
often called jump-seating or dead-
heading. (Jump-seating also describes flying
on your own or another airline for free or next-to-free, one of the perks of working in this industry. Dead-heading also describes flying an airplane from one city to another with no one but a few crew members aboard in order to pick up passengers or have mechanical repairs, sometimes called ferrying. )
The shortest flight in the world is British Airways’ twice-daily Flight 872 between Westray and Papa Westray, Scotland, which takes just two minutes.
The world’s longest flight is currently United Airlines’ nonstop Flight 821 between New York and Hong Kong (via the North Pole), which spans 8,439 miles in fifteen hours, forty minutes.
Flight crew supervisors have to track a large number of factors, like the number of hours each person has worked in a day or a month, the kind of aircraft each pilot is rated to fly (you can’t put a Boeing 747 pilot in an Airbus 319), and where each person lives in relation to his or her flight. For instance, many pilots live in a different city than their domicile
(the city from which their flights typically originate), so a pilot might have to take a ninety- minute flight just to show up for work in the morning.
Similarly, other supervisors are working around the clock tracking ground crew members, ensuring that airline representatives show up at the proper gate an hour before each flight, that agents are ready to help people make tight connections, and that the staff is ready to help guide an arriving aircraft in, unload baggage, fill the plane with fuel, and so on.
It ’ s no coincidence that
in no known language does
the phrase “ As pretty as
an airport ” appear.
— Douglas Adams,
THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL