The 33 Billion Dollar Opportunity for Business and General Aviation
USA Today travel section reports in an October 19 article by Alan Levin says that travel delays in the airline system cost US society 32.9 billion a year in lost productivity.
The research behind this assessment was funded by the FAA in order to promote the NextGen air traffic system, which they say in the article can be fully deployed by 2025. In the mean time we will just have to keep losing 32 billion in productivity; or maybe it gets worse.
A few interesting quotes from the article:
All told, people on airline flights were delayed by more than 28,000 years during 2007, the year the researchers studied.
The cost to individuals in lost time and inefficiency was $16.7 billion, the study says. Only a small fraction of travelers — ones who miss connections or whose flights are canceled — suffer about half of that cost.
”We call those guys disrupted passengers,” says Cynthia Barnhart, interim dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the study
The FAA and the ATA (Airline Lobbyists) believe that the NextGen system and more runways at the busier airports can solve this problem.
I would contend that NextGen and more runways will help, but they are oversimplifying the solutions to a major systemic problem in our air transportation system. The airline system of hub and spoke drives inefficiencies in travel by forcing people to travel indirect routes and then end up at destinations that are not closest to their true destination. More runways at the largest airports will help the airlines but it will not increase true travel efficiency.
The one solution the ATA doesn’t want anyone to think about is the use of Business Aviation and General Aviation aircraft to bring more efficiency to travel.
With an additional 5000 airports at our disposal, many in locations more convenient to our ultimate destination, business and general aviation should be seriously considered as a major part of the solution.
Mainstream media the ATA, and the FAA to some degree continually dismiss our subset of aviation as a viable part of the solution to the inefficiency that exists in air travel.
I see a 33 Billion dollar opportunity for those of us in business aviation but the airlines and the government are not going to hand it to us on a silver platter.
We have to create and communicate a better value proposition. We also need to insert ourselves into the conversations about the future of air travel in this country and gain a voice on the national stage.
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