Travel Summer from Hell!

Ultra-long tarmac waits tripled in June as industry stats hit new lows

If air travel woes were bad during the first five months of this year - and they were - they got even worse in June, according to the latest monthly numbers from the Transportation Department. Overall, the airlines' on-time arrival rate in June was just over 68 percent, down from 73 percent for the same month a year ago. For the first half of 2007, one flight in four arrived more than 15 minutes behind schedule, DOT said - the worst performance in 13 years of record-keeping. Even worse were the numbers for extremely long takeoff delays: 462 flights sat on the ground for more than three hours during June (mine from EWR-DFW just over FOUR hours), more than three times as many as in May. As if that weren't bad enough, flight cancellations in June hit a rate of 2.7 percent of all flights, up from 1.1 percent in May.

Here's the lovely cot that I got to sleep on at DFW gate D36 when I mis-connected on my way to my nephew's graduation at SNA.