As passengers wrack up hours of delays, airlines over schedule their fleets and the air traffic control system melts down this summer, the architect of deregulation says the system is working exactly as intended. In an interview with USA Today, former Civil Aeronautics Board Chair Alfred Kahn said: "Isn't it wonderful! It's the market working itself out. People may get so fed up with it eventually that they'll pay more to avoid all the hassle, or choose other means of travel, or choose not to travel at all. Or they might just decide to put up with congestion as the price they pay for getting really cheap fares. But the key point is that the market decides, not a bunch of know-it-alls in Washington."
Kahn, a long-time economics professor at Cornell, also said he gloats when he boards a crowded aircraft, and sees it as the ultimate litmus test on the success of deregulation. He called the financial benefit to travelers “staggering,” estimating it to be between $5 billion and $10 billion annually. However, the newspaper quoted Dorothy Robyn, an economist at The Brattle Group, who indicated that the 745 million passengers – a record number last year – saved an estimated $20 billion.
Reporter Dan Reed said Kahn gladly shoulders the blame for today's crowded conditions and reduction in service quality as well as the economic pressures on airlines. "People want both affordable and comfortable transportation," he says. "In the old days, you liked that empty middle seat next to you. But in the old days, you also were paying for that middle seat next to you. You just didn't know it." He pointed out the airlines were far from healthy pre-deregulation. In fact, despite its critical financial woes in the past six years, the industry’s profit margin has gone up. A typical profit margin for the industry pre-deregulation was about five percent, half of what United and others claimed for the second quarter alone.
Be that as it may, business passengers point to flight delays as their biggest time waster, according to a survey of 6,000 travelers done by Avis, said Business Travel News. “The survey found that frequent business travelers reported losing up to four hours on an average three-day trip, not counting time spent reclaiming baggage or in security lines at the airport,” said BTN. Travelers blamed an hour and a half of that time on traffic jams, being lost, waiting for tolls and looking for Internet connections.”
Respondents rated both road traffic congestion and flight delays as major inconveniences with three quarters citing flight delays and more than 50 percent citing traffic problems.
More than three-quarters of travelers surveyed rated flight delays as a major business travel inconvenience, and more than half similarly rated being stuck in traffic. Slightly less than half listed baggage claim waits, airport security and getting lost as major business travel time-wasting woes. Other annoyances include trying to find an Internet Café or WiFi hotspot, and checking in and out of hotels.