Ground Floor: I've been spending a bit of time in airports recently and so was unsurprised by the news reported in this paper's Current Account column last week that almost 25 per cent of European flights out of Dublin are delayed by more than 15 minutes - which, according to the Association of European Airlines, puts us at the top of the league of the 27 major airports surveyed.
Actually, for Europe as a whole, delays have decreased slightly from the comparable period last year. Regardless of the airport concerned, I've never met anyone who believed that a flight's departure time was anything more than a best guess at when it might leave, and certainly the flight times on tickets to London show an inbuilt delay factor of over half an hour.
Years ago your ticket told you that you'd be setting down in the UK a mere 55 minutes after leaving Dublin - now that time has been extended to 1 hour and 25 minutes.
Being fair to the airlines, they have to build in a certain amount of time for a tour of the runways - on one of my more recent flights to London we spent nearly as much time waiting to take off from Dublin and then waiting for our stand position in Heathrow as we did in the air.
However, it does mean that (as Current Account pointed out) the airlines and airport authorities can shift the blame back and forwards without ever really getting to grips with the problem.
One solution might be to stop scheduling multiple flights to leave at the same time. It's clearly impossible to have half a dozen flights depart at 7.25 a.m. but there are regularly that many scheduled to depart.
However, I do have a certain sympathy for both airlines and airport authority when it comes to passenger punctuality.
Perhaps aware that an aircraft won't take off without them unless it unloads the luggage first, and knowing how little they want to do that, passengers arrive insultingly late at the gate.
And I go absolutely berserk on hearing the tautology of 'last and final call' announcements for missing passengers being made half a dozen times.
With airlines charging for everything these days, from cups of tea made with water that cannot boil, to Michael O'Leary's proposed checked-in luggage costs, I think that the time has come to slap a charge on people who arrive late at the gate and delay everyone else.
A fiver a minute would do it and would improve punctuality schedules immensely. Plus, of course, a hefty fine for anyone whose luggage has had to be offloaded because they failed to show up.
Charging late passengers won't help with the rest of the air industry's problems though. While air travel itself has increased again after the post- 9/11 slump, the airlines continue to struggle for profitability.
In Europe, following a previous deal with pilots on productivity improvements, Alitalia has managed to get agreement from flight attendants for a restructuring plan which will allow the airline to borrow €400 million from the government.
Alitalia has made a profit in four years out of the last 16. SAS employees are threatening strike action if they don't get wage hikes and BA have cancelled 1,000 flights from Heathrow to "improve performance".
In the US, Delta has announced yet another restructuring in a bid to save $5 billion a year (though its auditors aren't overly impressed with the plan), United Airlines is in bankruptcy and is trying to lose even more jobs and, on September 12th, US Airways filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
According to the company, it has reduced annual operating expenses by almost $2 billion since it last came out of Chapter 11 in March 2003, but it hasn't been enough. US Airways (the 7th largest in the States) is trying to position itself as a low-cost carrier.
Possibly the only time that US industry has been urged to follow a European model, the chief executive of United Airlines, Glenn Tilton, recently suggested that airline companies in the US should merge in order to survive.
Back at home, of course, we continue to have the ongoing battle of the Aer Rianta restructuring and the saga of the Aer Lingus non-flotation.
Reports at the weekend that financial institutions would have a very limited interest in a private placement of Aer Lingus shares is hardly earth-shattering news. How excited would you be if your pension fund manager called you up and told you he was taking a stake in any airline in the current climate for the industry? The issues of security costs and the volatility of oil prices aren't going to go away any time soon.
Yet according to a draft Goldman Sachs report, the airline needs about €1 billion in funding to expand. How to access that kind of money is the difficult question.
The government desperately wants to sell off Aer Lingus but in a sector which has yet to get to grips with the totality of the change of the playing pitch, nobody is rushing to bite.
Bringing in Goldman Sachs to tell the Department of Transport that investors "are not currently well disposed towards airline stocks" is an exercise is stating the breathtakingly obvious. And why should the Department think that private investors (that's you and me) would want to take a troublesome stock off their hands? Goldman Sachs will be producing a final report in the next few weeks but, honestly, why bother? It's difficult to see any great changes in the immediate future.
Which means a bit more time lurking around the airports waiting for delayed flights. The average European delay is 37.7 minutes which, Current Account suggests, is ample time to do both Irish Times crosswords. Obviously s/he's much better at the Crosaire than me. It takes me the full one-hour-25-minute London trip to do. And even then it's a rare day when I get to actually complete it.
