At some point last year did you find yourself stuck in a noisy, overcrowded airport terminal for hours on end waiting for your flight to take off? If so, you were by no means alone. According to the Transportation Department, last year was the second worst year in history for delayed domestic flights.

Splitting my time between America and Europe, I find myself on a lot of airplanes during the year, and luckily I only had one sizable delay on my domestic connections. While I found it rather irritating at the time, looking back on it I feel lucky that it happened only once. That is far better than the national average, which showed that 26% of all domestic flights were delayed during the year.

Granted, national averages have only been recorded going back to 1995, but last year ranked as the second worst year on record, with 2000 coming in slightly worse with 27.4% of flights seeing delays.

What reasons are we given for the excessive flight delays?