Three-hour flight delays are 4x more common now than 30 years ago

On one sweltering summer season afternoon in June, thunderstorms rolled over Boston Logan International Airport. It was the type of transient, predictable summer season squall that East Coasters have discovered to ignore, but within hours, the airport fully shut down. Every departure was grounded, and flyers waited hours before they might get on their scheduled flights.

Among those stranded had been Maxwell Tabarrok’s mother and father, in city to help transfer him into Harvard Business School, where he’s finishing an economics PhD. Tabarrok told Fortune he was fascinated by how an total airport may grind to a halt, not because of some catastrophic event, but due to a predictable hiccup rippling through an overstretched system.

So, he did what any good statistician would: dive into the data. After analyzing over 30 years—and 100 gigabytes—of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, he discovered out his mother and father’ state of affairs wasn’t dangerous luck: Long delays of three hours or more are now 4 occasions more common than they had been 30 years ago.

Not only that, but Tabarrok discovered airways are attempting to cover the delays by “padding” the flight occasions—including, on average, 20 additional minutes to schedules so a flight that hasn’t gotten any quicker still counts as “on time.” Thus, on paper, the on-time efficiency metrics have improved since 1987, even as precise journey occasions have gotten longer.

“For 15 years, from 1987 to 2000, the actual and scheduled times stayed very close together,” Tabarrok said. “Then, starting right around 2000, they started diverging—a pretty clear sign airlines made a decision to start padding their schedules to avoid shorter delays.”

The padding carries a hidden financial value. Using average U.S. wage data, the additional minutes constructed into flights add up to roughly $6 billion in misplaced passenger time yearly, the researcher calculated.

There are far more customers in the National Airspace system today than there have been many years ago, industry sources say. U.S. Department of Transportation data reveals climate is the most common trigger of non-airline delays.  An ongoing scarcity of air site visitors controllers, mixed with latest FAA tools outages, has also disrupted operations worldwide.

A structurally unsound system

For Tabarrok, the basis of the issue isn’t just dangerous climate, outdated infrastructure, or even airline strategy: It’s incentives. He argues the FAA has little motive to reply shortly to rising delays because the company doesn’t bear the associated fee of stranded passengers, nor are they rewarded when airports run easily.

“I think the costs of delays can double, triple, quadruple over the next 10 years. But is anyone’s career negatively affected at the FAA? Probably not,” Tabarrok said.

He pointed to the scarcity of air site visitors controllers as an instance. Hiring and training more workers would ease congestion and scale back cascading delays—a very simple answer that many people have called for. However, doing so requires sustained effort and management that is definitely keen to push through bureaucratic inertia.

“You need somebody at the FAA who really cares about improving service. That’s not so easy to do because there’s really no incentive for somebody at the FAA to care a lot about this… they don’t get paid more,” Tabarrok said. “They don’t really get rewarded at all.”

A FAA spokesperson told Fortune the group prioritizes security, which sometimes necessitates delays. They pointed to a chart displaying the top 5 causes of delays—with climate being “by far” the most important trigger. They declined to reply questions about airways padding schedules and incentives to improve airport high quality.

Expanding airport capability, for Tabarrok, is the most apparent long-term answer to scale back the cascading delays. But the U.S. hasn’t opened a major business airport since Denver International in 1995, and runway construction at present hubs has been minimal, he said. Passenger site visitors, meanwhile, has grown by about 50% since 2000, that means more vacationers are concentrated in the same bodily space.

While now we have constructed bigger aircrafts to help carriers transfer more people, that’s also created new bottlenecks, he added. Bigger planes take longer to fly at every flip. They take longer to board, unload, and flip around at the gate, so the disruption continues to ripple into the schedule.

“The infrastructure at airports is fixed, especially season to season,” Tabarrok said. “So when you have more demand with fixed infrastructure, there’s going to be more delays.”

‘Pessimistic story’

Further, Tabarrok argued big-ticket fixes like building a new airport or runways face environmental reviews and legal challenges that can drag on for a decade.

That leaves staffing as the most life like answer, but even that will require altering how the FAA recruits, licenses, and trains controllers.

“It’s kind of a pessimistic story,” Tabarrok said. “We have these two constraints that aren’t that responsive to the market pressures of people’s demand for more reliable travel, and they’ve been around for a long time.”

Without those modifications, Tabarrok predicts the U.S. shall be locked into a cycle where every summer season thunderstorm or mechanical hiccup crashes airports and wastes hundreds of thousands of hours of Americans’ lives.

“If you just do some rough estimation of the value of people’s time, multiplied by how much time they’re spending waiting around in airports or waiting around for delays, you can easily get billions of dollars lost every year.” Tabarrok said. “And that cost will keep growing.”

This story was initially featured on Fortune.com