DELAYED: The Soaring Toll

Air travelers arriving and departing from Washington's three major airports suffered 4,897 days of late flights. About 1,077 of those days were spent sitting on the tarmac, waiting for flights to take off. The average late flight landing at the region's three airports arrived at least 51 minutes behind schedule, the data showed.

Delays at the three airports cost the regional economy about $267 million, according to a rough analysis of flight data by Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University.

Despite advances in technology that allow workers to use laptops and send e-mails from cellphones or other portable devices, Fuller said, the economic cost was probably greater than his estimate. Delay data only captures time lost to flights, not passengers.

For example, it does not tally the effect on fliers who miss connections and then spend hours at airports trying to get on increasingly crowded planes. There is no way to measure how long passengers wait in security lines or how early they must now get to airports. The data does not tabulate how long passengers must mill about baggage claim areas waiting for luggage. It also does not account for the air traffic system's growing inefficiency; many airlines have increased scheduled flight times to compensate for snarls.

"You just have the tip of the iceberg here," Fuller said. "The cost of delays has mushroomed into the economy, hospitality industry, businesses in general. It is affecting how we work, the efficiency of the economy. These costs occur every year, and they are getting worse."

Transportation officials say they have taken steps to address delays. Among the measures is redesigning congested New York-area airspace and culling the number of flights allowed to land and depart from John F. Kennedy and Newark international airports. Regulators say congestion on New York tarmacs is a leading cause of delays that ripple across the country. The 10 worst well-traveled routes to and from Washington area airports in terms of on-time performance all link to New York's three major airports, the data analysis showed.

Government officials are working on long-term solutions, too, including the development of a satellite-based air traffic control system that should help increase capacity. But the system is still years away from full deployment, and bills that would help fund the program appear to be stalled in Congress.

In data analyzed by The Washington Post, one flight highlights how air traffic congestion has altered life for travelers: Continental Express Flight 1276, which departs from Dulles International Airport at 2:50 p.m. and is supposed to arrive in Newark at 4:15 p.m.

The flight was the nation's fourth-worst in terms of total time lost to delays during the first 11 months of last year. Passengers on the 37-seat regional jet, operated for Continental Airlines by regional carrier ExpressJet, endured 14 total days of late flights. The worst one: on June 28, the flight arrived 8 hours late. Flight 1276 was canceled at least 16 times, helping it post an on-time arrival rate of 47 percent.

The flight's delays cost the airline and passengers about $860,000 in lost time and productivity, according an analysis by Clifford Winston, an economist at the Brookings Institution who recently co-authored a paper with Steven A. Morrison for the American Economic Review that examines the costs of flight delays and potential remedies.

Other airlines also have badly delayed flights but often change schedules or flight numbers during the year, making it difficult to track the total costs of delays to specific flights.

A Continental spokesman, David Messing, blamed the flight's problems on air-traffic congestion in the New York area. He said that when jams occur there, the carrier often has to thin its schedule.