Punctuality Push Produces Increased Profits For Airlines Costly Delays Reduced By Sticking Closer To Schedules

Three Milwaukee-bound passengers on a stopover in Phoenix got an unpleasant surprise recently after slaking their thirst in the terminal cocktail lounge. Returning to the gate, they could only watch forlornly through the window as their plane taxied to the runway, having unceremoniously dumped their luggage in a baggage cart on the tarmac.

“We made the boarding announcement and even paged them,” said Scott Sorensen, an America West flight attendant who worked that flight. “In years past we might have waited, but we no longer delay flights to accommodate passengers who arrive late.”

The logic of the situation seems apparent. “If a flight waits around,” explained Bill Compton, a pilot and executive vice president for Trans World Airlines, “that plane will be late all day long,” inconveniencing passengers systemwide.

But why has it taken until now for airlines to get tough on stragglers? The answer seems to be that, at long last, they can afford to. When they were losing more than $13 billion between 1990 and 1994, they didn’t dare leave late-arriving travelers behind for fear of sacrificing precious revenue and goodwill.

Now that they are enjoying record profits ($5.1 billion over the past two years), and are packing passengers in at the highest levels in half a century, the airlines have the luxury of teaching the laggards a lesson. And they are finding that being sticklers for punctuality is good for business.

“Until deregulation in 1978,” TWA’s Compton said, “about the only way we could compete was with a better meal or a better movie. We were like public utilities. After de-regulation, it took our industry more than a decade to become competitive. TWA, along with everybody else, lost sight of the fact that people buy an airplane ticket to get where they’re going on time.”

Keeping more closely to departure and arrival schedules also saves money - lots of it - that would otherwise be spent mopping up after the mess of missed connections. Northwest Airlines, for example, calculates that late arrivals cost it about $36 million a year in overtime pay and the expense of delivering mishandled luggage, feeding stranded passengers and booking them on rival airlines.

Improving on-time performance - defined by the Department of Transportation as the percentage of flights that arrive within 15 minutes of schedule - has become something of an obsession with airlines, which view high scores as a publicity bonanza.

In fact, the industry’s ratings have actually been slipping throughout the decade - from a peak of 82.5 percent in 1991 to 74.5 percent in 1996. But last year’s dismal showing resulted largely from the horrendous winter weather, and other uncontrollable forces have influenced the long-term decline, from increased airport traffic and fuller airplanes to the introduction of time-consuming security procedures at check-in counters. For the past two years, the figures have been further skewered by the government’s decision to start counting mechanical delays in the total.

But the absolute numbers matter less to carriers than their standings against their rivals, and everybody is scrambling to stay ahead of the pack. Delta Air Lines, for example, has stopped making announcements at the start of boarding calling for passengers needing assistance.

TWA recently stopped holding up flights for connecting passengers stuck on delayed flights, except in unusual circumstances, preferring to risk the wrath of the fewer connecting passengers than of the many more passengers who would be inconvenienced while awaiting the others’ arrival.

And many airlines are looking at such time savers as electronic ticketing and what is called gate-reader technology, a system that automatically keeps track of who is on board and where they are seated - functions that are now done manually.