WASHINGTON — Airline flight delays cost passengers more than inconvenience - $16.7 billion more - according to a study delivered to the Federal Aviation Administration last week.
The FAA-funded study looks at the cost to passengers for flight delays in 2007, the latest year for which complete data were available when researchers began working on the study.
Unlike past studies of the effect of flight delays, researchers looked more broadly at the costs associated with flight delays, including passengers’ lost time waiting for flights and then scrambling to make other arrangements when flights are canceled.
The cost to airlines for delays was $8.3 billion, mostly for crew, fuel and maintenance. Overall, the cost was$33 billion, including to other parts of the economy. But one finding of the study is that more than half the cost associated with flight delays is borne by passengers.
Those costs likely were lower in the three years since 2007, due to the weakened economy. Air travel peaked in 2007 before the economy went sour. And so did flight delays and cancellations. In 2007, 1.3 million domestic flights were delayed and 119,000 flights canceled, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Last year, 85,000 flights were delayed and 63,000 canceled.
Mark Hansen, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who led the study, said he thinks 2007 is a more representative year “since we think that the weak economy isn’t a permanent thing.”
Business, Pages 83 on 10/24/2010