Air travelers haven’t seen the end of packed planes, flight delays and mishandled luggage just yet: Labor Day weekend looms.
Starting Wednesday, nearly 16 million passengers, up 2.6 percent from last year, are expected to jam airports amid the long holiday weekend, capping the worst season for air travel in recent memory.
“If summer so far is any indication, it’s going to be a mess,” said Kate Hanni, head of a consumer-rights group and publisher of .
But if you thought that the end of summer vacations and the start of school would signal the end of torment for airline passengers, think again. A more extended crisis awaits travelers in the months ahead.
New airlines are adding planes, which may mean more flights and cheaper fares. With that comes more delays, more crowds, more frustration. Pilots are in short supply and air-traffic controllers are retiring at a record pace, trends that could make matters worse.
“Any way you look at it, it’s bad,” said Lance Sherry, executive director of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at George Mason University in Virginia. “If people don’t get fed up with air travel and take other forms of transportation, then there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”
During the first six months of the year, nearly a quarter of all flights were delayed, the amount of mishandled baggage jumped 25 percent and complaints climbed nearly 50 percent. The figures were the worst since the federal government began gathering such data in 1995.
And these delays are no longer a 15- to 20-minute ordeal. From June 1 to Aug. 15, one out of every seven flights, or nearly 200,000 in all, were delayed 45 minutes or more, according to ., an online flight tracking service. So-called “excessive delays” are up 36 percent from a year ago.
Denver International Airport expects heavy traffic this weekend.
“Labor Day is fairly busy simply because it’s the last holiday of the summer, so to speak,” said DIA spokesman Chuck Cannon. “Historically it’s been very busy, and this has been a very busy summer anyway.”
In June, the most recent month for which traffic figures are available for DIA, nearly 4.6 million passengers used the airport, up 3.3 percent from the same month of 2006 and a record for the month of June. The record passenger traffic came even as the number of flight operations at DIA declined 2.6 percent in June compared with the year-ago month.
DIA will release its forecast for traffic figures for the next week, including Labor Day weekend, today.
Denver Post staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi contributed to this report.
