Unfriendly skies

Grounded planes, crowded flight paths, and other delays are playing havoc with travelers trying to make their airport connections. Here's what some airlines at Boston's Logan International are doing about it.

The worst part about air travel can be when passengers on delayed flights miss their connections - and then discover the next flight departed minutes ago, while they were waiting to talk to an airline agent.

The airline industry is trying to change that.

The industry faces a daunting task, as the confluence of bad weather, aircraft safety inspections, and too many planes clogging the antiquated air traffic control system have led to an uptick in flight delays and cancellations in Boston and across the country. But by providing more information on delays and more quickly rebooking customers whose flights were delayed or canceled, the industry hopes to ease travelers' irritation and pass out fewer meal and hotel vouchers to stranded passengers.

At Boston's Logan International Airport, American Airlines Inc. is testing out a gate-side customer service center and a phone bank that should help passengers get rebooked on alternate flights faster. Next month, the airport and the Federal Aviation Administration will unveil monitors mapping out storms and delayed flights across the country. And by the end of the summer, US Airways plans to have a team of agents at Logan that will monitor flights arriving late, rebook passengers who miss their connections, and greet the rerouted passengers at their arrival gate with a new boarding passes in hand.

"It speeds the passengers on their way," said Suzanne Boda, senior vice president for East Coast operations at US Airways. "We hope it makes their experience much nicer in not-so-nice circumstances."

This year is off to a tumultuous start at Logan and airports nationwide due to the past month's mass cancellations by American and several other carriers, which grounded part of their fleets for maintenance inspections. Those disruptions are likely to keep occurring as the FAA spot-checks airlines' compliance with a broad range of safety requirements through June 30.

But even before the FAA audit, the industry's performance was lagging. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, cancellations at Logan rose last year to 3.41 percent of the domestic flights; nationwide, 3.47 percent of domestic flights were scratched. And Logan's on-time domestic departures fell to 75 percent last year while on-time domestic arrivals also dipped, to 70 percent; that compares to on-time departures dropping to 74 percent nationwide and on-time arrivals slipping to 70 percent.

Delays are lasting longer, too. The average length of Boston's delayed departures rose to 62 minutes last year while delayed arrivals landed 58 minutes behind schedule. Nationally, tardy departures stretched to a 57-minute delay and belated arrivals pulled in 56 minutes late.

In this industry, every minute matters - especially for passengers who are trying to catch connections. That's because passengers who miss their connections because of delayed flights often have to walk from the arrival gate to the front of the airport, wait in line with travelers who are checking luggage, and go back through security.

In May, Logan will become one of the first airports in the country to receive 50-inch flat-screen monitors showing the location of each commercial aircraft across the US airspace - as many as 5,000 at once. These Vortex monitors - which the FAA is paying for and the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, is providing space for - will also show disruptive weather conditions through the country.

This air-traffic display in each terminal will be updated every two minutes with a live feed from the FAA's Systems Command Center in Herndon, Va., where decisions are made to hold flights.

"If people have information, they can at least understand why they're being delayed," said FAA spokesman Jim Peters. "And it might help reduce their anxiety as to when they might get out - or at least let them make alternative plans."

Logan is also one of the few airports where American is experimenting with two methods that let stranded passengers more quickly claim seats on alternate flights. In August, it established a Customer Service Center steps from its gates inside Terminal B. That staffed desk allows passengers who have already cleared the security checkpoint to get rebooked on another flight without the hassle of walking to the reservation desk on the other side of the security checkpoint.

And in January, American installed five red phones on a wall close to its customer service center. Passengers who don't want to wait in line to deal with an airline agent face-to-face can pick up a receiver and be directly connected to an airline reservationist - cutting ahead of everyone who's dialing the 1-800 phone number from their land lines or cellphones.

American's Customer Service Center came in handy for Barbara Haber, a food history consultant who was headed to a conference in New Orleans Wednesday. As she sat at Logan's Gate B32, the Winchester woman found out the first leg of her flight, from Boston to Dallas, was canceled and she had automatically been rebooked on another flight that would arrive in New Orleans two hours later than the original flight.

Haber, who was hoping for something sooner, asked the Customer Service Center agent for help and got rebooked on a flight that would arrive only one hour later than her initial flight.

She said she could live with that. "Everything is so exacerbating," she said.

In three or four months, American expects to put self-serve kiosks next to its phone bank so customers who are automatically rebooked or who make new arrangements over the phone can print out their boarding passes, said Jim Moses, American's managing director at Logan. For now, they need to get boarding passes from airline agents, which often requires standing in line.

By the end of the summer, US Airways plans to have a team of several agents at Logan dedicated to tracking flights that will arrive late and rebooking passengers who will miss their connections. This Passenger Operations Control team will run new boarding passes over to the arrival gate and hand them out to passengers. A customer whose new connection isn't until the next day will also be handed a hotel reservation, arranged and paid for by the airline.

The Passenger Operations Control service, which already hustles passengers through five of the airline's hub or shuttle airports, also boosts employee morale.

At Philadelphia International Airport, gone are the hour-long lines of stranded US Airways passengers agitating to be helped at the gate-side special services desk, to the relief of junior-ranking airline agents who got stuck staffing that station.

"The senior agents didn't want to work there," said Nelson Camacho, US Airways' director of passenger service in Philadelphia. But he noticed veteran employees have begun volunteering for the special services desk because customer requests are now the pleasant kind - like changing seats and upgrading to first class - and those queries don't take long to deal with. "You don't want to have 400 people in line."

Nicole C. Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com.