NPR Broadcasts From ‘The Troubled Skies’

Travel Blog  •  Rob Verger  •  04.24.09 | 10:18 AM ET

Photo by Donald Verger

There are a few truisms about the airline industry today.

First: It’s no fun to be in the airline business at the moment.

Second: It’s more fun if you’re a passenger, because fares are cheap—although no one is sure how long they’ll stay that way.

For example, JetBlue advertised (via @JetBlue) some $29 one-way fares yesterday, although restrictions included the fact that the low fares were only good for travel on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. (As for the latest development in a la carte fees: Delta just announced it will start charging $50 for a second checked bag on international flights.)

Third: as demand slows and the national system becomes less stressed, things seem to be operating more smoothly.

What else? The ripple effect of the airline slowdown is being felt in secondary industries, like rental car companies. Oh, and one more thing: we need an upgraded air traffic control system. The combined cost of the upgrade could cost the government and the airlines together a total of $40 billion.

This is the territory that NPR tackled all last week in an excellent series called Welcome to “The Troubled Skies.” For a fantastic overview on most of the points mentioned above, I recommend listening to each short segment—most are about five minutes long. Among the stories: the reporting takes listeners inside Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport for a look at the effect of the 15 percent slowdown in air travel at that airport; it looks at the long road ahead to the GPS-based NextGen air traffic control technology; and it takes a trip to the Evergreen Maintenance Center in the Arizona desert.

Give it a listen.

Tags: Air Travel, Airplanes, Airports, Airworld, North America, United States, Nevada, Las Vegas, News and Briefs

Rob Verger

Rob Verger is a frequent contributor to World Hum and the site's former air travel blogger. His articles and photographs have appeared in the Boston Globe and other publications, and he's a former undergraduate writing instructor at Columbia University. If you like, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or follow him on Twitter.


1 Comment for NPR Broadcasts From ‘The Troubled Skies’

Ling 04.26.09 | 10:02 AM ET

I’m more interested, at this point, in what happens when demand goes back up. The airlines have alashed routes, grounded planes, laid off employees and generally speaking, made a mess of their infrastructure, just to make it look better on paper. And it’s going to be total chaos when passenger volume starts growing.

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