I'm pretty sure the Federal Aviation Administration hates America.
Every few months or so, an official stands on a podium in some government building, and calmly announces that the following months will see more delays, more cancelled flights and a generally poorer flying experience than ever before.
They cite different reasons. Sometimes it's a fuel shortage. Other times they claim the problem is a surge of passengers. Once they deferred responsibility to the jet stream"" which apparently is a fast moving stream of air crossing the entire world where all of the pilots go skinny-dipping on lunch breaks (or is that the ""cockpit?"").
This time around, the FAA is blaming the air traffic controllers. These brave and fearless men risk their lives every day by sitting in darkened towers watching screens with little dots moving around on them. Occasionally they give orders (""Flight two-niner-seven, bearing second star to the right, straight on till morning"") and something called ""clearance."" I'm not exactly sure what ""clearance"" is, but flight controllers spend most of their time issuing and withholding it from flights. Maybe it has something to do with the jet stream.
Anyway, the air traffic controllers are apparently overworked. Since there are more flights in the air at any time, the screens have become rather overcrowded with dots. The FAA has strict regulations regarding the distance between planes at any given time and the number of flights a particular controller is withholding clearance from. Apparently if pilots aren't reminded that their clearance is withheld every 10 seconds or so, they get scared and crash the plane. Or something.
So once again, the delays have started piling up. Since we aren't too far into the fall travel season, the days begin without delay, and, on a good day, the country can stay on-time for up to 17 seconds. Once we hit Thanksgiving, however, the delays will stretch until the FAA finds itself guiding planes that took off weeks earlier.
Part of the problem, of course, is the profile of your standard flight has changed. Instead of packing people into jumbo jets and making a few trips per day, we fly smaller planes more often and strap the extra passengers to the wings.
So if you're traveling home for the holidays, prepare for a nasty experience. Of course, after my last air travel adventure, I'm not sure how much worse it can get. I was traveling with friends to New York. We boarded the flight in Chicago with plenty of time. As we were settling into our seats, the captain informed us our flight had been delayed, and we would need to get off the plane. So we de-planed. And then we re-planed. We taxied to the runway. We waited for several hours. We taxied back. We got off to stretch. We re-planed again. We traveled back to the runway and participated in some sort of ancient prayer to the jet stream that involved flapping our arms really really fast.
It was when the captain ordered us to ""do the hokey-pokey"" and ""turn it all around,"" that I realized we were never getting off the ground. And when we finally returned to the terminal, dejected and miserable, we were informed that the earliest we could get to New York was two days later. Oh, and our luggage was already there.
We had no choice. Fourteen hours later, our arms incredibly tired, we arrived at LaGuardia to pick up our luggage. And then we started waiting for our flight home.
Keaton recommends that if you entertain thoughts of flying this holiday season, you should immediately run into a wall over and over until you fall down. You'll feel exactly the same as if you had been through the air travel system, and it won't cost you a penny! E-mail him at keatonmiller@wisc.edu.
