Aviation Weather Delays :: essays research papers

Weather Delays. We seem to devour heard so much more about them in recent divisions. Is the weather getting worse? Are the newer planes less able to stand the rough weather than the planes of thepast? Maybe travelers just complain more What is the reason for the 70% development in flightdelays and 23% increase in cancellations blamed on the weather since 1978? Are the airlines justusing weather as a piece of cake all to cover other problems and keep themselves covered under thestatemeant you cant control the weather. I will attempt to answer these questions along with afew others in this report but, the question that cannot be escaped from beginning to the end seemsto be Is the weathe rreally that bad?Lets start with why have the flight delays increased so much since 1978.It all seemed like agood idea at the time, and for many, it still is one of a short numerate of good ideas to come from theFederal Government Airline Deregulation . This allowed for more competion between air lines inmore ways than ever before not moreover could they compete for customers on strictly a customerservice stand point but also for the price of fares and the amount flights offered to the morepopular destinations. Up until this DEREGULATION, the Federal Government through theDepartment of Transportation strictltly controlled the amount of flights an airline could scheduleand the amount they could charge for these flights. Weather or any other problem could onlyhave a limited effect on the flight schedule as only about one third as many flights werescheduled then as are scheduled today? Then what is considered by many to be one of a long incliningof oversights by The Federal Government nothing was done to the air traffic control system toaccount for the inevitable increase in passengers and flights scheduled. Much of the U.S.Air employment Control System was then and is now operating on World War II era technology with mostof the updates coming only as needed to accommodate ei ther the Cold War or NASA. Sometwenty-two years latter the inevitable is now upon us .Consider this in the year ofderegulation(1978) there were 250 million passengers carried by the US airlines in 1999 thisnumber topped 650 million. All other factors organism equal this would result in more passengersbeing delayed or canceled just by the growth of travel.Why does the older equipment cause so many problems ?The main reason is system overloadwith no more flexibility available in the system.