The events of 9/11 and the recession have cut sharply in to airline travel. That has been demonstrated by carriers cutting routes and laying off employees. There were a few airline bankruptcies last year. Delta (NYSE:DAL) bought Northwest in a consolidation meant at least partly to cut costs.

One positive by-product of falling passenger activity was few flight delays. That trend is about to come to an abrupt end.

New projections from think tank The Brookings Institution says that because almost all air passengers depart or arrive in one of the nation’s largest cities, that as travel rebounds with the recovery delays will hit unprecedented levels.

The Brookings research relied on numbers from the United States Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The spike in flight delays will come because of increased passenger activity but also because most air travel is done between a very small number of big airports and a large portion of flights are only 500 miles or less, which means that those planes are in the sky a very short time. The combination of these factors will be impossible for airports to offset. They only have so much capacity at any hour of the day.

Arrival delays in recent years have been 22% of flights. Heavy traffic tends to send that level up sharply. Over the last twenty years, even with the effects of the recession, the average weight of a delayed flights has gone from 51 minutes to 57 minutes.

If Brooking is right, there will be many more delays and waiting an hour for take-off will become common place.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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