U.S.

When Flying Didn't Take <i>Forever</i>

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

September 28, 2000 / 8:09 PM EDT / CBS

It was the dawn of the jet age when propellers gave way to jet propulsion — 1958, when fast gave way to faster.

Andy Ross was there. The 29-year United Airlines pilot flew his first jet in 1965.

Back then, "Newark to Chicago only took two hours and 10 minutes with the jet," he said.

What Ross and others couldn't have dreamed is that 40 years later, jet travel would be a victim of its own soaring success, CBS News Correspondent Jeffrey Kofman reports.

Never mind the delays that have plagued the skies this summer, or the complaints about everything from airline food to ticket sales overkill to empty airline promises that finally result in customers' air rage. The simple fact is, if you look through airline schedules for the last half century, you'll find that it takes longer to fly major routes today than it did when jets were first introduced.

Take Capt. Ross's Newark-Chicago run. It took two hours and 10 minutes in 1965; today it takes two hours and 25 minutes. Cincinnati to Atlanta was one hour and 14 minutes in 1964; now it's an hour and 40 minutes.

The worst is the New York to Miami route. The published time in 1960 was a lightning fast two hours and 15 minutes — today it's almost an hour longer, at three hours and three minutes.

And that's if the flights get there on time: this past June a third of all commercial flights arrived at the gate late.

It's easy to see why. There are ten times as many people flying today as there were 40 years ago — more planes, more routes, more congestion.

Ross remembers a less-harried time.

"I remember going out and there'd be maybe three or four planes ahead of you and you'd be off in a very short time. Now it may be nose-to-tail for half a mile," Ross added.

Look at Newark. It hasn't changed much since Ross flew prop planes. Its capacity in good weather is about 40 takeoffs an hour, yet on a recent day, airlines had scheduled more than 50 flights during peak hours, leaving planes and passengers fuming on the runway.

"They schedule this airport like I was in the middle of Arizona with no other airports around and the weather's always nice," air traffic controller Dan D'Agostino said.

The airlines blame an antiquated air traffic control system. And they say they schedule their flights when people want to fly.

"If it takes us two hours to fly somewhere and that's the amount of time it takes to get you to that gate, we're certainly not going to schedule it for an hour and a half because that's the optimal flying time of the airplane. (If) you really want to make passengers angry, that's a good way to do it," said Dave Fuscus of the Air Transport Association.

For now, those passengers can only dream of a past when airlines treated them like royalty and got them to their destinations in remarkable time.