Having recently spent 38 hours traveling the 2,400 miles between Binghamton, N.Y., and my home in Tucson, Ariz., much of that time in airports, I couldn't help but think how we arrived at this point.
Delays are now running at six-year highs, yet we have allowed a strained air travel system to develop in this country while airlines pile up tidy profits, raise fares, cut routes and add fees.
First, getting from here to there is increasingly challenging when here and there happen to be midsize or smaller airports where airlines have been assiduously reducing flights. Second, the domestic air travel system -- one that is prone to disruptions anyway -- has no slack and is now exceedingly vulnerable to disruptions. As we saw recently.
"One man did this," a Southwest ticket agent at a severely disrupted Midway International Airport in Chicago told me, ruefully shaking her head as she tried to figure out when she could put me on a connecting flight to Tucson. The next day, it turned out, was when.
She was referring to a person, identified by authorities as a disgruntled former contract employee with the Federal Aviation Administration, who was charged with setting a fire on Sept. 26 at a major regional air traffic control center that crippled operations at Chicago's two major airports, O'Hare and Midway, and rippled out from the Midwest crossroads through the domestic system.
As the air traffic center near Chicago struggled to resume normal operations, flight delays and cancellations piled up, worsened by bad weather. From Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, 4,326 flights were canceled and 39,742 were delayed, according to Flightstats.com. With no slack in the system and most planes full, passengers had to scramble to find new flights.
The FAA tried to put a positive spin on its recovery work in Chicago. "Dozens of FAA technicians from the Chicago area and other parts of the country are making significant progress in restoring the telecommunications equipment and cabling," the agency said in a statement Oct. 2 -- a day when flight cancellations, with a hobbled system coupled with bad weather, peaked for the week.
Criticism of the agency's management of the air traffic control system has been mounting in Congress. Critics also noted a scathing audit report last month by the Transportation Department inspector general's office that criticized the FAA for long delays, cost overruns and systemic faults in its $4.5 billion plans to replace ground-based radar for air traffic control with a satellite system by about 2020. Major airlines have been reluctant to invest in new aircraft electronic equipment to accommodate that system, whose "costs may outweigh benefits," the report said.
The Chicago incident also prompted criticism that lax security, as was evident at the Chicago-area facility, makes the aviation system even more vulnerable to disruption.
"One assumption nearly all business travelers are willing to make is that airport facilities, especially air traffic control facilities, are among the most secure locations in the world," said Greeley Koch, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. He suggested that security at vital air traffic control centers should be at least as stringent as it is at airport security checkpoints.
"I think the one question on many people's minds is, how could one incident have such an impact on our system?" Michael P. Huerta, the FAA administrator, said in a speech to an air traffic controllers group the day after the fire. "I do understand the traveling public's frustrations with flight delays and cancellations."
He said he ordered a 30-day review of FAA contingency plans and security protocols "to make sure that we have the most robust policies and practices in place."
I mentioned at the start of this column that I spent 38 hours getting home, the kind of inconvenience that many of you also had if you flew during that period. My trip included an unanticipated car rental to drive from Binghamton to Albany in an attempt to ensure a more reliable flight connecting through Chicago, as well as the $200 I paid for a hotel near Midway Airport when my flight was canceled. Airport hotels often raise prices when demand is intense, and a Southwest agent told me that it would not provide a voucher for the hotel because "the problem was caused by air traffic control, not the airline."
Another observation about my long trip home is just grouchiness. A generation of young travelers evidently has become conditioned to being on the floor at airports -- sometimes to crawl for access to an electrical outlet, sometimes just because there is no place else to sit. This disaster emergency center look is not good, airports.
On the other hand, as the comedian Louis C.K. has said about air travelers who whine, we do need to put things in perspective: "You're flying! In a chair -- in the sky!"
And let me add a personal note of grim irony. I got home on Sept. 29, which happened to be the eighth anniversary of a trip I took in 2006 that ended up in a horrific midair collision over the Amazon, which killed 154 on a 737 airliner that went down in the jungle while seven of us on the business jet that the 737 collided with made a harrowing landing and were taken into custody.
So after the debacle in Chicago, all of us got home safely, right? My bag was even waiting at the airport, where a cordial Southwest baggage clerk actually sought me out to make sure I found it.
A little perspective, that's all.
Joe Sharkey's column, On the Road, appears in The New York Times business section.
Travel on 10/19/2014