Comments on: Air Traffic Delays Are Awful, Everything Else is Worse

By: Dilan Esper

Dilan Esper — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:29:45 +0000

One reason for delays to keep in mind is that airlines use lots of smaller planes to fill up schedules at major airports, both to have a flight scheduled at any hour when a traveler wants to travel, and also to take up slots and gates that could be used by competitors.

In contrast, in Japan, they use 747′s on crowded one hour flights.

We could certainly change our ticket tax system to incentivize the use of larger planes, i.e., tax by the plane, not the passenger.

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:31:15 +0000

dcuser, it isn’t a particularly deep insight to say fewer flights would mean less air traffic congestion. Fewer cars would mean less freeway traffic as well.

Congestion pricing would limit the number of flights at the most heavily taxed times, at least if the tax is high enough. And this may well make sense.

But I think it’s a bit of a cop-put to treat the air traffic control system itself as given, not subject to improvement or alteration.

Continued economic growth will likely mean that any reduction in flights by changing the incentives to fly small planes vs large will be short-lived. We might get fewer flights on larger planes initially, but we’ll eventually have the same or more flights all on large planes simply through continued passenger growth.

So we need to think about pushing the boundaries of the constraints like how we do air traffic control.

By: dcuser

dcuser — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:40:09 +0000

What do you think about the observation (by James Fallows and others) that widespread delay is exacerbated by the airlines’ increasing reliance on frequent-scheduling with small planes, rather than less frequent scheduling with larger planes. Obviously, the frequent nonstop flights do give a consumer advantage. (I love being able to fly directly city to city.) But they seem to misprice/misallocate costs, since 30-seat jets use the same amount of atc resources (and take up pretty much the same landing slot unit) as 200-seat jets, but benefit only a tiny fraction of the number of people.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:16:13 +0000

“Posner complains prices are too low, and if you regulated higher prices the competitive market would – judging from history – respond with food. But that’s hardly a tradeoff worth defending.”

To say the least. According to this GAO report (http://www.gao.gov/htext/d06630.html), the median airline price has dropped 40% in constant dollars since 1980. Even on a relatively inexpensive flight (say, the $125 that Expedia is quoting for DCA to LGA), you’re still looking at a $50 minimum for that steak dinner.

By: David R. Henderson

David R. Henderson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:01:31 +0000

Responding to KipEsquire: Yes, that Crandall NYT article was bad but note that it’s not the Bob Crandall at Brookings. It’s the Bob Crandall who used to run American Airlines. Crandall’s piece recently on the WSJ op/ed page is first-rate.

By: KipEsquire

KipEsquire — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:18:03 +0000

My jaw dropped too when I saw Posner suggest that the CAB did not price-regulate. Meanwhile, did you see Robert Crandall's NYT op-ed last week that made many of the same fallacious arguments as Posner?