Another crazy week in the world of travel. There was a plane crash in Central Asia that killed 68 people. It was an old-model 737 and it’s yet another unsolved situation.

And, we’re still trying to figure out what happened to that Spanair plane that crashed in Madrid.

There’s a political implication too: Have you ever wondered why, when travel is the largest industry in the world (it employs the most number of people and is singularly responsible for the GDP of over 93 countries) here we have a presidential election where everyone is talking about change … not one person is talking about travel?

Not one candidate has talked about the mess of our air traffic control system.

Not one candidate has talked about the mess of our airlines.

Not one candidate has talked about the mess of our travel infrastructure—we have no high-speed rail system in this country. We’re just messed up.

THE EASY SOLUTION FOR FLIGHT DELAYS

You don’t have to be a presidential candidate to figure this out. The Department of Transportation publishes the on-time performance for every flight based on route. It’s actually easy to find and they do this every month. (here’s the link)

For example, if you want to fly between Boston and Newark, you might want to stay away from Continental flight 1191—it arrived late 95 percent of the time. American Airlines flight 2361 from O’Hare to Dallas beat it—it was delayed 96 percent of the time.

And whatever you do, don’t even think about taking Comair flight 5292 from Minneapolis to JFK. It’s got a perfect score of 100 percent. That’s right, it never showed up on time. Ever.

I was on an American flight the other day going from Washington D.C. to LaGuardia. Now, you can pull up this information very easily—the Department of Transportation publishes it on their Web site. I checked that particular flight—not just for that month, but for the last 12 months—and it only had an on-time performance rate of 39 percent.

Here’s my solution to the delay problem in America. Go back to the last 12 months and any flight that’s delayed more than 50 percent of the time, just take it off the schedule. Don’t operate it. Any flight that’s late that much is going to cost you, it’s going to cost me, and it’s going to cost the airlines in terms of misconnecting passengers, misconnecting bags, additional fuel burn … should I go on?

This is not rocket science: I don’t want to book a flight that’s going to be on time only 39 percent of the time.

When you actually look at those DOT statistics and add them up, guess what you’re going to find? You’re going to find so many of these flights that are only on time 39, 40, 46 percent of the time.

That’s not a very heartening figure, especially if you’re doing connecting flights and they’re only giving you a 45-minute connect time. That’s called a “legal connect time.” That’s not a legal connect time; that’s a suicidal connect time.

When you have airlines scheduling for competitive reasons, and not intelligent reasons, then guess what? You’re going to have 84 flights scheduled to leave the runways at 8 a.m. when there are only two runways. And therefore, we have a 39 percent on-time percentage rate. Or, in the case of the Comair flight 5292, a ‘perfect’ score of being delayed 100 percent of the time.

PUPPY LOVE AND POST-OLYMPIC TRAVEL

For the last three weeks, I’ve been talking about the Olympics in China. And I’ve been talking about how, if you’re a dog in Beijing, you’re having a great time. The Chinese authorities sent letters to 112 sanctioned Olympic restaurants telling them that they had to take dog off the menu.

Well, now another story has come across my desk. Saudi Arabian religious officials have outlawed the sale of dogs and cats to men on the grounds that pets can be used to pick up women.

That’s right, the head of the commission in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (no, his name is not Eliot Spitzer), said the ban was necessitated by the rising use of men using cats and dogs to make passes at women. Men caught with pets will have their animals confiscated on the spot.

Uh oh, you know what that can mean. Let’s hope they don’t ship them to China because they’ll immediately go on the menu. They’ve had a three-week reprieve, but for a dog in China, I hope it gets a visa and leaves. Otherwise, it’ll become an entrée.

The good news is that if you’re traveling to China now, there’s a total glut of hotel rooms. They were opening hotels at the rate of one per week in China for the last two years.

Now, they have to fill all those rooms. The good news is that you’ll get a room real cheap. But whatever you do, don’t bring your dog.

From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio- listen here.

Read more from Peter’s Travel Detective Blog.