Air Travel Delays: Bad, Getting Worse

"I am so frustrated that I'm past anger," Wright-Lions said as she waited for her evening flight home.

Nancy Sturtevant, 69, and her husband, Peter, 72, were burrowing through a pile of bags at Dulles airport yesterday, looking for their luggage. They were returning home from a vacation in Alaska but had been delayed a day in Salt Lake City, where they spent the night in a motel, on their way home to Williamsburg, Va.

"Who do you get mad at?" Nancy Sturtevant said.

"It's hard to remember one day after the next after this hard a night," her husband added.

FAA officials said about 2,400 flights were delayed on Sunday and 2,000 on Monday. Traffic on those two days was 5 to 7 percent higher than on comparable days last year, FAA officials said. "There are a few key areas -- New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas -- that can really affect our system nationwide," said Robert A. Sturgell, deputy administrator of the FAA. "This summer has been particularly challenging in the weather patterns we have been seeing. When you combine that with the volume of traffic in the Northeast, it makes for a very difficult day in the system."

Airline executives described similar problems after storms no longer threatened their airports. US Airways struggled to get flights off the ground in Philadelphia even after the weather cleared, because controllers were having trouble integrating those flights into the heavy traffic flow into New York on Sunday and Monday, executives said.

"The analogy I like to use is that this is like normal rush-hour traffic," said David Seymour, vice president of operations for the carrier. "But this rush hour runs the entire day. When you have bad weather, it's like shutting down a couple of lanes."

To help ease traffic congestion in New York and the rest of the country, federal officials say they will soon roll out a redesign of the area's airspace, giving controllers and airlines more options when storms strike. They are also working on a new air traffic control system that will allow planes to fly more efficient, direct routes. That system is not expected to be operational for years, however.

Gordon M. Bethune, a former chief executive of Continental Airlines, said the system will ease delays, but he expressed frustration at the slow pace of deployment.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, airline traffic plummeted and delays eased. "We should have used that time to build up infrastructure," Bethune said. Congress is considering legislation that would fund the FAA and its next-generation system, but passage is not certain.

Even if the new system is successful, some consultants are not sure it will do much good. While the new system may help speed traffic in the air, it will be difficult to build the runways needed to handle them or safely incorporate more flights flowing into the complex web of Northeast airports.

"There is just too much traffic," said Darryl Jenkins, a consultant. "I don't see anything changing for a long time."

Staff writers Xiyun Yang and Alejandro Lazo contributed to this report.