Watch Harvard: three -hour flight delays now four times more common than in 1990

Among those who are blocked were the parents of Maxwell Tabarrok, in town to help him move to the Harvard Business School, where he finished an economic doctorate. Tabarrok said Fortune It was fascinated by the way in which an entire airport could stop, not because of a catastrophic event, but because of a predictable hiccup undulating through an overly extensive system.

Thus, he did what any good statistician would be: to dive into the data. After having analyzed more than 30 years – and 100 gigabytes – data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, he discovered that the situation of his parents was not a bad luck: long delays of three hours or more are now four times more common than they were 30 years ago.

Not only that, but Tabarrok found that airlines were trying to hide delays by “padding” the flight times – adding, on average, an additional 20 minutes at times, so a flight that did not get faster time still “in time”. Thus, on paper, the performance measurements have improved since 1987, even if the real journeys have been longer.

“For 15 years, from 1987 to 2000, the real and planned times remained very close to each other,” said Tabarrok. “Then, starting around 2000, they started to diverge – a fairly clear sign that the airlines made the decision to start padding their hours to avoid shorter delays.”

The padding has a hidden economic cost. Using data on medium -sized American wages, the additional minutes integrated into flights increased to around $ 6 billion in passenger time lost per year, the researcher calculated.

There are many more users in the national airspace system today than decades ago, according to industry sources. Data from the Ministry of US Transport show that the weather is the most common cause of non-American delays. A continuous shortage of air traffic controllers, combined with recent FAA equipment failures, has also disrupted operations worldwide.

A structurally unrelated system

For Tabarrok, the root of the problem is not only bad weather, obsolete infrastructure or even the strategy of airlines: these are incentives. He maintains that the FAA has little reason to respond quickly to growing delays because the agency does not support the cost of blocked passengers, and they are not rewarded when airports are going well.

“I think the costs of delays can double, triple, quadruple over the next 10 years. But someone’s career is negatively assigned to the FAA? Probably not,” said Tabarrok.

He underlined the shortage of air traffic controllers as an example. Hiring and training more staff would facilitate congestion and reduce cascade delays – a very simple solution that many people have requested. However, this requires supported efforts and leaderships which are really willing to pass through bureaucratic inertia.

“You need someone at the FAA who really cares about improving the service. It is not so easy to do because there is really no incentive for someone from the FAA to care about it a lot … They are not paid more,” said Tabarrok. “They are not really rewarded at all.”

A spokesman for the FAA said Fortune The organization prioritizes security, which sometimes requires delays. They highlighted a graph showing the five main causes of delays – over time being “by far” the greatest cause. They refused to answer questions about airlines and incentives to improve the quality of the airport.

Expanding the capacity of the airport, for Tabarrok, is the most obvious long -term solution to reduce cascading delays. But the United States has not opened a major commercial airport since Denver International in 1995, and the trail construction in existing hubs was minimal, he said. The circulation of passengers, on the other hand, has increased by around 50% since 2000, which means that more travelers are concentrated in the same physical space.

Although we have built larger planes to help carriers to move more people, which has also created new bottlenecks, he added. The larger planes take more time to fly with each turn. They take longer to embark, unload and turn around at the door, so that the disturbance continues to collapse in the calendar.

“The airport infrastructure is fixed, especially the season to season,” said Tabarrok. “So when you have more demand with fixed infrastructure, there will be more delays.”

“Pessimistic story”

In addition, Tabarrok has argued the fixes of large tickets such as the construction of a new airport or tracks in front of environmental examinations and legal challenges that can make a scenario for a decade.

This leaves staff as the most realistic solution, but even it will require changing the way FAA recruits, licenses and training controllers.

“It’s a kind of pessimistic story,” said Tabarrok. “We have these two constraints which are not so sensitive to the pressures of the demand market for more reliable travel people, and they have been around for a long time.”

Without these changes, Tabarrok predicts that the United States will be locked in a cycle where each summer storm or that the mechanical hiccups crushes airports and loses millions of hours of life of Americans.

“If you simply make an approximate estimate of the value of people’s time, multiplied by the time they spend waiting in airports or expect delays, you can easily lose billions of dollars each year.” Tabarrok said. “And this cost will continue to grow.”