All week, I’ve been hearing from readers about missed connections and delayed flights as airlines are flying into the peak summer travel season with load factors — the percentage of seats filled — approaching 90 percent. With demand up and overall domestic capacity down, there is absolutely no slack in the system.

“Right this minute, 6 of the 15 largest airports in the U.S. are virtually paralyzed with ground stops or ground-delay programs,” Meara McLaughlin wrote in an e-mail message to me last Thursday night.

Now, I have spoken with Ms. McLaughlin on several occasions over the last few years, and she is not the excitable sort, so I knew she was right. In fact, Wednesday night, I had routinely perused the “airport status and delays” link at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Web site, www.faa.gov, and noticed that airports in the Northeast were reporting delays of as much as five hours.

O.K., so we have trouble. Now what are we going to do about it?

Ms. McLaughlin has one answer. She is the vice president for development and marketing at a Web site called FlightStats.com. For some time, Ms. McLaughlin has urged me to have a close look at FlightStats.com, which I have avoided doing until now, on the admittedly dubious theory that copious amounts of immensely detailed flight data can make your head explode.

This turns out not to be the case. In recent days, I have spent many hours browsing and fiddling with the FlightStats.com site.

Trust me, it is the real deal — an agglomeration of real-time information on the status of just about every airline flight in the world (including code shares), as well as conditions, including departure and takeoff times for flights, at more than 900 airports and 420 airlines worldwide.

You remember that great line in the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” where the war-mongering Gen. Buck Turgidson begs the president not to allow the Soviet ambassador into the war room as nuclear Armageddon looms: “He’ll see everything. He’ll see the Big Board!”

Well, Flightstats.com lets you see the Big Board. “You have the ability to raise the veil,” Ms. McLaughlin said.

Essentially, every airport arrival and departure board is available in real time. (There is no fee.). There is also a wealth of historical and predictive data showing, say, what conditions are likely to be at any airport in the next 10 days. There are links that send alerts to travelers three hours before a flight time. Corporate travel managers can use one of the site’s features to monitor, in real time, the air travel status of employees on the road.

“Right now, we’ve got a network air traffic system that really is struggling,” Ms. McLaughlin said, stressing the value of immediate, reliable information collected in one easy-to-use spot.

“And when you have an interrupted traveler, it’s not like the airlines have a way to reaccommodate them. Not only are people running into trouble frequently, but the are faced with fewer resolution options,” she said.

“If you have one airport with severe delays or a ground stop, that’s a problem. With six or eight, you have catastrophic delays. Airlines today can’t quickly rejuggle everybody; travel managers can’t rejuggle, because there is no slack in the system.”

With 90 percent load factors added to volatile summer weather in a system strained to capacity, information is power, especially if you have no choice but to plunge into the system regularly, as is the case with most regular business travelers.

By the way, have you heard that as of last Sunday, Los Angeles International Airport shut down one of its four runways for construction, reducing operational capacity by 25 percent at one of the world’s most important airports, with no reduction in flights?

“Watch LAX,” Ms. McLaughlin warned.

It isn’t as if the current mess in domestic air travel comes as a surprise. “Starting in May, the media have been, like, ‘Oh, it going to be terrible, just awful this summer,’ ” she said, adding: “That showed a certain degree of prescience. But what do you do about it? Well, when the going gets tough, the tough travel smarter.”

For next week’s column, let’s hear from you about your own air travel experiences this summer, including horror stories.

Source: New York Times