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By DAVID ARMSTRONG
San Francisco Chronicle
Nasty weather across the nation, too many jam-packed airplanes in the sky, too few airline employees on the ground and an outdated, overextended air traffic control system threaten to make this a long, hot summer for already steamed air travelers.
Aviation experts say an unprecedented convergence of problems will make this the worst air travel season since 2000. That's when widespread worker slowdowns at United Airlines rippled throughout the nation's aviation system, causing cascading flight cancellations and delays.
It's even possible, they say, that the summer of 2007 could turn out to be the worst ever.
An all-time record 209 million passengers are expected to take to the skies with U.S. carriers from June through August of this year, up from the previous record of 207 million last year, according to the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group. Most planes are flying full, but even the average load factor -- the percentage of seats sold -- is at a historically high 85 percent.
This makes space and comfort hard to come by at a time when airlines have cut back on amenities like free food.
"This is a perfect storm," said Terry Trippler, an airline analyst and travel pundit in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "The system is wound so tight these days. It runs fine when it's 75 degrees and sunny in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but as soon as the first raindrop falls in Texas, you get backups at Dallas-Fort Worth and then delays out of San Francisco."
Summer is barely a week old, and already air passengers say they are feeling burned.
On Thursday, US Airways canceled several flights out of San Francisco International Airport, citing rough weather elsewhere and other causes. That triggered angry e-mails and phone calls from stranded passengers.
On Wednesday, American Airlines canceled flights at SFO -- not because of problems at the airport itself but because of thunderstorms in the Midwest that slowed operations at Dallas-Fort Worth, a key hub airport for American, the world's largest airline measured by passenger traffic.
Last week, rough weather delayed and canceled other American flights, too.
American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner said the airline tries to help passengers rebook, but with summer flights so full, a quickly rescheduled departure is not always possible.
As for vouchers for free hotels and meals for travelers stranded by extreme weather, Wagner said, "Unfortunately, those are circumstances beyond our control. Just like many other airlines, we do not pay for hotels. We simply can't control the weather."
In the first half of this year, American canceled about three times the number of flights it grounded in the first half of 2006. Other U.S. carriers are posting similar increases.
Part of the problem rests with an antiquated air traffic control system, said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association. The price for upgrading the system and using Global Positioning System technology throughout could run from $15 billion to $22 billion. If work began today, it could be fully implemented by 2025. But squabbling over funding among airlines, airports, owners of private corporate jets and the federal government is keeping a wide-ranging, badly needed redesign from taking off, Castelveter said.
In line with that, the turbulence fliers are experiencing is not limited to one or two star-crossed airlines. It strikes broadly across the entire U.S. aviation system.
The nation's airlines slashed staffs so drastically during the travel downturn of the last several years that now they don't have enough employees to handle a very heavy air travel season, said Henry Harteveldt, principal analyst in the San Francisco office of Forrester Research.
Also to blame are bad weather, inadequate infrastructure, downsized and overworked airline staffs, and money-losing airlines trying to recoup from years of red ink by starting new routes and replacing big jetliners with many small regional jets, said Harteveldt. He said airlines at times launch new service without a clear flight plan to profit.
"The airlines are behaving an almost suicidally destructive manner, just throwing airplanes into the air, not because they should but because they can," he said.
That stresses the air traffic control system and crowds airports. "We have no new airports; we have not many new runways in the U.S.," Harteveldt said.
Even before the problems of this week and well before the expected Fourth of July crowds, well-publicized snafus grounded or delayed flights operated by Northwest Airlines, United and Cathay Pacific Airways.
Airline experts expect more of the same here and around the country.
"This is going to be a very tight year, and it's going to get tighter," said Kevin Mitchell, head of the Business Travel Coalition, a Radnor, Pa., association of corporate travel planners.
"The problem is the system," Mitchell said. "The system was designed 40 years ago, and they were anticipating 65 percent load factors, not the mid-80s load factors of today."
(Chronicle staff writers George Raine and Kantele Franko contributed to this report. E-mail David Armstrong at davidarmstrong@sfchronicle.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)
