Aviation Weather Delays :: essays research papers

Weather Delays. We seem to have heard so much more about them in recent years. Is the weather getting worse? Are the newer planes less able to stand the rough weather than the planes of the past? Maybe travelers just complain more What is the reason for the 70% increase in flight delays and 23% increase in cancellations blamed on the weather since 1978? Are the airlines just using weather as a catch all to cover other problems and keep themselves covered under the statemeant †you cant control the weather†. I will attempt to answer these questions along with a few others in this report but, the question that cannot be escaped from beginning to the end seems to be Is the weathe rreally that bad?† Let’s start with why have the flight delays increased so much since 1978.It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and for many, it still is one of a short list of good ideas to come from the Federal Government Airline Deregulation . This allowed for more competion between airlines in more ways than ever before not only could they compete for customers on strictly a customer service stand point but also for the price of fares and the amount flights offered to the more popular destinations. Up until this â€Å"DEREGULATION†, the Federal Government through the Department of Transportation strictltly controlled the amount of flights an airline could schedule and the amount they could charge for these flights. Weather or any other problem could only have a limited effect on the â€Å"flight schedule† as only about one third as many flights were scheduled then as are scheduled today? Then what is considered by many to be one of a long list of oversights by The Federal Government nothing was done to the air traffic control system to account for the inevitable increase in passengers and flights scheduled. Much of the U.S.Air Traffic Control System was then and is now operating on World War II era technology with most of the updates coming only as needed to accommodate either the Cold War or NASA. Some twenty-two years latter the inevitable is now upon us .Consider this in the year of deregulation(1978) there were 250 million passengers carried by the US airlines in 1999 this number topped 650 million. All other factors being equal this would result in more passengers being delayed or canceled just by the growth of travel. Why does the older equipment cause so many problems ?The main reason is system overload with no more flexibility available in the system.