Flight delays are piling up at this often-maligned New Jersey city. Of the 100 most-delayed flights over the past year, 40 come and go from Newark, a key gateway to New York City, according to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Here's why they consistently run late, even though airlines pad schedules with hours of extra time.

By Scott McCartney, The Wall Street Journal
The two most chronically delayed flights, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, are both Delta Air Lines departures from Newark to Atlanta, one at 5 p.m. and the other at 6:25 p.m. In other words, rush hour.

Flight 2743, the 5 p.m. departure to Atlanta, ranked worst for the 12 months through May. It has plenty of padding in its schedule — Delta times the 745-mile trip to Atlanta for two hours, 43 minutes — 30 minutes longer than the airline's 10:30 a.m. flight from Newark to Atlanta, and about an hour longer than the typical flying time of one hour, 40 minutes in the air.

But the extra time isn't enough. Flight 2743 was 30 minutes late or more on six of every 10 trips. And when it was late, it was really late, averaging a whopping 83-minute delay. The 6 p.m. departure, Flight 2843, ran late on half its trips. The average delay was 79 minutes.

Much of the bottleneck is in Washington, D.C. Both flights out of Newark have to fly through heavily congested airspace in the Washington area, Delta says, where much of the traffic headed into and out of the Northeast meshes together, creating a choke point for the nation's air travel. One flight, Delta 2843, also suffered because the airplane used on that trip comes to Newark from Atlanta in the late afternoon, and it runs chronically late.

"It's a systematic issue with Newark in the afternoon and evening," said Dave Holtz, Delta's managing director of operations. He thinks problems that have plagued New York's other two major airports, Kennedy and La Guardia, are catching up to Newark now.

Airlines can't really blame the delays on the weather. While there were record-setting snowstorms last winter, on the whole, the weather for flying hasn't been that bad. With this year's drought, summer thunderstorms that often disrupt travel haven't been as frequent in many parts of the country as in years past. What's more, airlines have reduced their schedules across the country because of high oil prices. Through the first five months of this year, the number of flights was down 4.7 percent, according to BTS.

Given that, the system should be operating fairly smoothly this year. But the number of late departures was up 8.6 percent through May, and late arrivals were up 9.6 percent. Overall, the percentage of flights arriving on time was 76.6 percent this year through May, the worst in the past three years for the same time period.
Newark has been the worst of the worst. In 2008, the FAA imposed restrictions on airline scheduling at Newark, similar to limits placed on New York's other two major airports. At Newark, airlines can't schedule more than 81 "operations" — takeoffs and landings combined — per hour. But because airlines schedule to the maximum limit, any delay during the day pushes the next hour over its capacity limit, then the next and the next. There's little ability for the airport to catch up unless airlines cancel flights, which they have been doing more often, sacrificing regional airlines and their small-jet flights for takeoff and landing slots for larger jets with more passengers.

United Airlines, which now has about 75 percent of the traffic at Newark through Continental Airlines and its regional-airline feeders, had two flights of its own show up on the BTS Top 10 list. One was a Continental flight from Chicago to Newark at 5 p.m. The other was an ExpressJet regional airline flight that leaves Newark for St. Louis in the evening.

The New York-New Jersey region has some of the most congested airspace in the U.S., a United spokesman said in an email. But the airline blamed a larger issue, saying, "This further reinforces the need to complete the FAA's airspace redesign project and modernize the nation's antiquated air traffic control system."

Southwest Airlines, which now has more domestic flights than any other carrier, had several at the top of the BTS list of the most chronically delayed flights. Flight 50 from Dallas Love Field to Kansas City at about 8 p.m. ranked in the top 10, as did Flight 1229 from La Guardia to Chicago's Midway Airport at 7:25 p.m.

T he Dallas-to-Kansas City flight often encountered snags throughout the day. In some months, the airplane for Flight 50 started the day in San Francisco, where morning fog delays are frequent. The airplane often got bogged down on the East Coast as well. Some months it started in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., moved up the East Coast and then to Houston and Dallas before ending the day in Kansas City.

Another problem that flared from time to time: Southwest does overnight maintenance on one-third of its fleet each night, and since Kansas City isn't a maintenance base for the airline, planes had to be switched if a particular aircraft needed overnight work. That can mean delaying the flight to Kansas City until a plane is available that doesn't need overnight routine maintenance.
Southwest reworks its route schedule nine times a year, but over and over the Dallas-Kansas City evening flight has been dealt a bad hand. "Occasionally when we shuffle, we get unlucky and bad cards still come together," said Steve Hozdulick, Southwest's senior director of operational performance. "It took us a while to tweak it out."

With La Guardia, Hozdulick says, Southwest has been slow to heavily pad schedules since it began flying to the delay-prone airport in 2009. So Southwest flights into and out of La Guardia have frequently run late.

One flight that should have made the top-10 list but didn't: Southwest's 5:45 p.m. departure from Baltimore to New York. Since the airline changed flight numbers 14 times during the 12-month period, the flight didn't show up in the BTS list, which is tracked by unique flight numbers.

Combine all those flight numbers, and the 5:45 p.m. flight would have ranked No. 1 — worse than the two Delta flights out of Newark. Hozdulick said the Baltimore-La Guardia flight was at the end of the day and simply fell victim repeatedly to air-traffic control delays.

To keep airlines from expunging woeful operating performances just by changing the flight numbers, the Department of Transportation last year started requiring airlines to report flights together when they change flight numbers but have departure times within 30 minutes. (BTS, however, could sort 12 months of data for this study only by unique flight number.)

The new reporting rule helps Delta — Flight 2355 from Atlanta to Los Angeles and Flight 1977 from Chicago to Atlanta would be knocked off the top-10 list. But the rule hurts Delta, too. If similar flight numbers had been linked in the recent BTS rankings, a Delta flight departing Atlanta at 5:45 p.m. would have ended up in the top 10.
Source: