FRANKFURT - The dreaded summer air travel season is upon us, which reminds me of Dr. Johnson's quip about 18th century ocean travel, `all the comforts of jail, plus the chance to drown.'
Air travel in North America and Europe is in gridlock. Flights are an average 30 minutes late. Air traffic control systems broke down last summer and will likely do so again this year. Passengers are treated like diseased cattle; airports resemble POW camps. Baggage vanishes; prices are outrageous. We now have Soviet-style service at capitalist prices.
Airlines blame air traffic controllers. Controllers blame airlines for scheduling departures at the same time. Unions blame airlines, who blame unions. Everyone rightly dumps on the brain-dead Federal Aviation Agency.
Too many passengers is the principal cause of this growing international crisis. In 1999, North American airlines carried 623.9 million passengers. By 2005, they will transport 767.4 million. This relentless increase produces shortages of air space, runways, aircraft, gates, terminal space, ground transportation, air traffic controllers. Airport congestion is now so bad, runway collisions are considered a greater threat than air crashes. Gulag conditions, cascading delays magnified by the spoke and hub system used by large carriers, and the filthy, oxygen-depleted air in terminals and aircraft are producing a wave of passenger air rage.
Twenty years ago, half of America had never been on an airplane. Today, everyone flies. That's the problem. Bargain air fares are too low, while business fares far too high. A regular flight from Toronto to Ottawa can cost more than a bargain fare from Toronto to Paris. As a result, aircraft and airports are swamped by low-fare travelers. A businessman flying executive class on Continental from New York to Los Angeles return pays US $2,942; a bargain fare traveler, US $395. Business fliers are forced to subsidize the hordes of budget travelers. Give-away pricing produces ever greater congestion.
The solution to air gridlock: lower business fares and cut back discount fares to reduce volume. But the public has come to expect cheap subsidized fares as an inalienable right, and will raise a huge rumpus if prices go up.
Meanwhile, airlines are cutting every corner possible to save money. They reduced cockpit crews on large aircraft from three to two. Intake of fresh air into aircraft was outrageously reduced by 50% to save heating costs, producing stale cabin air filled with germs and CO2. Aircraft continue to be made light to save fuel, rather than more crash - and fire-resistant.
The latest cheese paring by the airlines is called extended twin engine operation, or ETOPS. This is an FAA-approved procedure allowing airliners with only two engines to fly long, over water routes provided they are within 120 minutes of an airport. This rule proved a godsend for the airlines. It allowed them to replace four and three engine jets on the North Atlantic run with cheaper to operate twin engine Boeing-767's. Today, almost 75% of all transatlantic flights are on twin engine planes. There's even talk of extending the range of the ubiquitous short-medium haul Boeing 737 to cross the Atlantic on cheapo charter service.
The latest generation of powerful engines used on modern aircraft are very reliable, with an extremely low record of in-flight failure. If one of the 767's engines does fail on an Atlantic crossing, it can still return on the other engine to the UK, or make an airport in Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland. I'm not aware of any commercial twin-engine jet ever losing both engines over the Atlantic - though such an event is theoretically possible. I feel more comfortable on a venerable four-engine Boeing-747 or the excellent new four-engine Airbus A-340.
A battle is now shaping up over the lucrative North Pacific routes, which, until recently, required three or four-engine aircraft to make the long crossing. Boeing managed to get FAA to approve its new, very large, twin engine 777 for a 207-minute ETOPS on the Pacific run. This allows a 777 on the North Pacific run to fly over three hours away from the nearest airfield at zero headwind.
The North Pacific is notorious for bad weather and strong headwinds that often exceed 120 mph. Pilots' unions say a 777 with a dead engine flying against such headwinds could take as much as 5 hours to reach an emergency landing. Key diversion airports along the Alaska to Japan route across the Aleutian Islands and over northern Siberia are primitive. They lack shelter, fire-fighting equipment and instrument landing systems.
Pilots claim this puts passengers at risk. I agree with the pilots. The A-340 was designed for long hauls over water and is ideally suited for Pacific and Atlantic crossings. I always choose the A-340 and B-747 over the B-767 and B-777.
Two engines and two pilots are fine - so long as nothing goes wrong. But if it does, particularly over long water routes, give me a flight engineer and two more engines.
Copyright: E. Margolis, May 2000
"War at the Top of the World" - The struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet by Eric Margolis - available in all major book outlets, in Canada and the U.S. and online.
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