This has been a miserable year for flying on U.S. airlines -- or a pretty good year, depending on your point of view. Certainly it has been a year of extremes.
The negatives, of course, have grabbed headlines. Battered by Americans' fear of flying after Sept. 11, defections of business fliers and the troubled economy, US Airways and United -- two of the 10 majors -- filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Smaller carriers Midway, National and Vanguard stopped flying, stranding thousands.
Tightened security made travel an ordeal, especially early in the year. We learned to arrive at the airport hours earlier, whip off our shoes and belts while enduring embarrassing searches, and excise scissors, knives and a laundry list of other banned items from our carry-ons.
The second half of the year brought a blizzard of restrictions on low-fare tickets, higher excess-baggage fees, stingier compensation for being bumped or delayed and higher prices for paper tickets.
But there were plenty of pluses. Leisure travelers enjoyed low air fares. Discounters JetBlue and Southwest added routes and flights. More planes took off on time. Airlines lost less luggage. Self-service check-in stations mushroomed.
We are arguably safer in the air than we were before Sept. 11, 2001, thanks to more than 44,000 federal security screeners deployed to all 429 of the nation's commercial airports -- beating a Nov. 19 deadline that critics said they couldn't make.
"For passengers, this was a good year," says Jamie Baker, a J.P. Morgan airline analyst. "For [airline] shareholders, it was anything but."
Peter C. Yesawich, president of Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell, a marketing firm based in Orlando, Fla., refines it a bit more. "If it's convenience you're looking for, it was a challenging year," he says. "If it was a great fare you were looking for, you should have found it."
Here's a look at how leisure air travelers fared in key areas:
Fares: "We got ourselves one heck of a deal in 2002," says Tom Parsons, chief executive of Bestfares.com, a travel Web site. "We're seeing fares that go back to the 1980s."
A few months ago, Parsons says, $198 round trips were available between San Diego and London. I recently booked round trips from LAX to Las Vegas for $38 and to Oakland for $54, about half the lowest fares during much of 2001.
