Flights to Newark

The column uses data put together by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics to zero in on problems of the most chronically delayed flights in the U.S. Look at the Top 100 worst flights among the habitually tardy and you’ll see that 40 of them takeoff from or land at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.Newark matters if you are going to New York, and even if you aren’t. You may be in St. Louis waiting for a flight to Los Angeles and you are delayed because the aircraft assigned to your flight got delayed earlier in the day on the East Coast. Delays spill across the country, and they typically build as the day goes on. Schedules are usually more reliable in the morning.Newark, always among the most delay-plagued airports in the country, has declined even more. Some of the issues are old: the congested New York airspace, badly in need of a long-delayed redesign; the chokepoint of the Washington, D.C., area, so clogged that planes sit on the ground waiting to takeoff not because of a lack of runway capacity at Newark but because of a lack of spaces on regimented airborne highways over Washington; scheduling by airlines that tries to pack too many small jets into overcrowded airports.

And yet, this year’s problems are worse than previous years. The weather, except for severe snow storms last winter, has actually been fairly cooperative, airlines say. And the number of airline flights is actually down, though few schedule cuts have been made at peak rush hour periods at busy New York airports.If things are better, why are the results worse? Some of the problem may be decline in airline operations themselves shortages of pilots, more mechanical breakdowns, longer repairs because of a lack of parts, or just the added minutes it takes getting planes loaded when every sit is filled and every overhead bin is full. Some may be problems at the Federal Aviation Administration, which has struggled with modernization of equipment and airspace. Satellite-based navigation promises more routes for planes and less waiting on the ground, but the FAA hasn’t caught on to the GPS era yet in a major way.Improvements have to be made, somehow. It takes a plane about one hour and 40 minutes to fly from Newark to Atlanta. And yet the most chronically delayed flight, No. 1 in the Top 10, took about four hours to make that trip 60% of the time.