With several airlines emerging from bankruptcy and merger mania apparently on the back burner for the moment, carriers were convinced they'd get a better report card from the federal government.
They were wrong.
The 2006 year-end report issued by the Department of Transportation (DOT) says on-time arrivals are down and baggage problems are up. The document shows both at alarming levels, especially for an industry that has slammed the public with higher fares two dozen times in the last two years.
Passengers are paying more for less: 11,200 per day reported mishandled bags in 2006, boosting the year's total beyond four million. Though only a 1 per cent increase over 2005, it's still the worst rate since 1990.
The percentage of on-time arrivals is only slightly better, the report says. The rate of 75.5 per cent would be just enough to get a baseball player elected to the Hall of Fame but is hardly enough to keep the airline industry out of the Transportation Hall of Shame.
The last time the on-time arrival late was so poor was in 2000, the year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 threw the nation's transportation network into a mad scramble for survival.
Struggling to survive the economic consequences, airlines have cut costs by reducing staff and fleet size -- issues that directly impacted the traveling public.
According to the DOT, overbooked planes caused more passenger bumping and boarding denials in 2006 than in 2005.
There were also more checked bags, especially late in the year after British authorities thwarted a terrorist plot involving planes bound for the United States.
Especially bad marks went to Atlantic Southeast, operating a Delta Connection, and Chicago O'Hare, which operated on-time 66 and 69 per cent of the time, respectively. At the top of the DOT's charts were Frontier (81 per cent on-time) and Salt Lake City (86 per cent on-time departures).
Although the DOT conceded that bad weather was responsible for numerous delays, its report also blamed high traffic volume, maintenance issues, and turnaround time.
The only area where airline performance improved over the year before, the DOT said, was in the number of consumer complaints.
Perhaps consumers are tired of taking the time to complain about a system that seems to need a total overhaul. Many have accepted bad airline service as a fact of life.
