Amish RakeFight
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http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/business/21AIRTRAVEL.html?pagewanted=print
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May 21, 2006
Rough Summer Is on the Way for Air Travel
By JEFF BAILEY
CHICAGO, May 20 — Brace yourself for a summer of miserable air travel.
Planes are expected to be packed fuller than at anytime since World War II, when the airlines helped transport troops. Fares are rising. Service frills are disappearing.
Logjams at airport security checkpoints loom as the federal government strains to keep screener jobs filled. The usual violent summer storms are expected to send the air traffic control system into chaos at times, with flight delays and cancellations cascading across the country.
And many airline employees, after years of pay cuts and added work, say they are dreading the season ahead. Those workers — and there are about 70,000 fewer of them than in 2002 — will be handling more than 100 million more passengers this year than they did four years ago.
The friendly skies, indeed.
"Everybody's stressed. Everybody's feeling it," said Bryan Hutchinson, a former baggage handler at United Airlines who now works in a joint airline-union program to counsel workers suffering from stress or other emotional problems.
Above gate B-22 at Denver International Airport, with smells from the Quiznos sandwich stand below filling his office, Mr. Hutchinson receives a steady stream of burned-out looking United employees.
Easy days are rare. An arriving plane is delayed. United shifts an outbound flight to a smaller plane. Thirty passengers are bumped. Some become irate.
And at the end of the shift, a gate agent "shows up in my office and says, 'I'm whacked out,' " Mr. Hutchinson said. He refers some workers to mental health professionals, and offers others strategies for coping: Take a couple of deep breaths; go vent to a co-worker.
Passengers feel the stress, too. For some, the best coping strategy is to avoid flying. Randy McCroskey, a consultant who lives in Maryville, Tenn., grew weary of sliding his 6-foot-4, 300-pound body into the seats of the smaller regional jets that increasingly serve Knoxville's airport.
He says that he now drives to see clients as far away as 500 miles. His former limit was 100 miles. That cuts his air travel by more than half.
"Rather than fight through security, not know if I'll get a seat on a flight, get bumped, it's easier to just get in my car," Mr. McCroskey said. "When I pull into rest stops, I see the same guys in the bathroom I'd see at hub airports."
But the airports are still busier, as traffic has risen along with the stronger economy and the recovery from the sharp downturn that followed the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. About 207 million passengers are expected this summer, the Air Transport Association said, roughly 2 million more than a year ago.
And the effects of that seemingly modest 1 percent jump are magnified by the fact that there will be 4 percent fewer flights this summer, according to American Express.
Domestic flights are running at about 80 percent full, and that means that flights on popular routes are often fully booked. Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com, said that advanced bookings suggest that planes, on average, should be close to 90 percent full this summer.
"It means flights will be sold out," he said. "They're downgrading aircraft types, from wide to narrow bodies, narrow bodies to regional jets."
Airline executives say they try to prepare for the always-busy summer season. "Look, load factors are higher than they've ever been, and thunderstorms occur," said Peter D. McDonald, executive vice president and chief operating officer at United. But United has spread out arrivals more evenly to avoid logjams, he said, and more flight crews will be standing by on reserve in the summer to handle scheduling mishaps.
Mr. McDonald said that despite the many sacrifices employees at United have made to keep the airline in business, including steep pay cuts, "there's no reason to believe they've lost focus here."
After 9/11, airlines parked hundreds of planes to cut costs. Financial problems mounted, leading several major airlines to file for bankruptcy-court protection. They laid off workers, cut frills and switched to smaller planes on many routes.
Six big airlines cut their fleets by about 700 planes, or close to 20 percent, since the peak in June 2001, the Air Transport Association said.
Airlines also shifted larger planes from domestic to international routes. With scant competition from low-cost competitors internationally, airlines can charge higher fares on such routes.
Last summer, for instance, Delta Air Lines operated four big Boeing 767 jets, with 252 seats each, on routes across the country.
This July, those four 767's, reconfigured with 204 seats — including business class seats with elaborate entertainment systems — are flying to Edinburgh; Düsseldorf, Germany; Kiev, Ukraine; and Budapest.
Replacing the 767's on domestic routes are smaller 757's, seating 183 each. And that draws still smaller planes onto routes once flown by the 757's.
Over all, Delta will have 81,692 fewer domestic seats to sell each day this July compared to the same month in 2005. That represents a drop of about 18 percent. But while the airlines were shrinking their fleets, business came roaring back, resulting in packed planes. "Travelers longing for an empty middle seat are recommended to buy one," said Jamie Baker, an analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities.
Airlines, still struggling because of high fuel prices, have been able to raise fares because of the tight capacity. David Strine, an analyst at Bear Stearns, said that he expected fares to rise about 8 percent this year. Fares are still not as high as they were in the late-1990's, though.
Free rides are increasingly hard to come by. "Using frequent-flier mileage is virtually impossible today," said Julius Maldutis, an industry consultant.
Indeed, Mr. McCroskey, the Tennessee consultant, recently gave in and bought two $600 tickets for a Las Vegas vacation with his wife, leaving his pile of Delta frequent-flier miles untouched. "You can't use them," he said. "August was the first thing they were showing."
As air traffic increases, the security screening system becomes taxed, too, and those jobs become more stressful. The Transportation Security Administration is hustling to fill screener jobs for the summer crunch. Turnover runs about 20 percent a year.
Los Angeles International Airport's screening staff is about 10 percent below a target of roughly 2,000 screeners. The New York area's three big airports have an aggregate screener crew of about 3,800, but even fully staffed that is "inadequate" to handle traffic, said Marc Lavorgna, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. "They do a good job," he said, "with what they have."
Still, Kip Hawley, the security agency's administrator, said in an interview that, approaching summer, "we are going to be ready in terms of our work force." Local managers have hiring authority to speed the staff buildup.
New procedures are likely to slow some travelers. The agency says it plans to conduct more secondary screenings to check for traces of explosives.
Last month, at Atlanta's airport, a computer-generated image suggesting an explosive— not from an actual bag being screened — was flashed to test a screener's alertness.
The screener, after identifying the threat, is supposed to be told it was only a test. This time, that didn't happen, and a frantic search ensued for a bag that did not exist.
The terminal was shut down for about two hours, Mr. Hawley said, and the bomb squad was called. The glitch that caused the panic has been fixed, he said.
"We do recognize the economic damage" of shutting a terminal down, he added. "That won't happen again."
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