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FAA Targets Air Traffic Delays
Updated 12:36 PM ET March 10, 2000
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Trying to avoid a repeat of last year's long airplane delays, President Clinton today announced a plan to ease gridlock when spring and summer thunderstorms snarl traffic at the nation's airports. "We can do a better job, starting next summer," he said.
With aviation industry officials and his transportation secretary beside him, Clinton announced an effort to reduce delays through shared use of high-technology weather forecasts. It also features a Federal Aviation Administration Web site with information about the weather's impact on travel schedules. It will debut on April 3.
"Until we work out a way to get Mother Nature to cooperate, storms, delays and cancellations will always be with us," Clinton said. "If we can photograph and analyze weather patterns from space, we ought to be able to tell passengers why they are delayed and for how long."
Also, traffic planners at the FAA's air traffic control system command center in Herndon, Va., will be given more authority to make decisions to keep traffic moving. The FAA and the airlines will hold teleconferences throughout the day to address conditions two to six hours away.
To help speed traffic in poor weather, the Pentagon will work with the FAA to allow use of military airspace off the East Coast. The FAA and the airlines also have developed a list of alternate routes to take aircraft around storms and have agreed to make better use of lower-level airspace to deal with more traffic at peak times.
"America's 21st century air traffic control system should provide 21st century, high-tech service," Clinton said. "We must meet these challenges in a way that helps, not harms, everyone who is a part of the air traffic control system. And we must always keep safety at the top of our agenda."
It's a strategy that takes on new urgency in light of a forecast issued earlier this week that commercial airplanes flying in U.S. airspace will carry more than 1 billion passengers a year by 2010. That's up from 650 million last year.
Pilots seeking clearance to take off last summer heard the words "ground stop" all too often. Taxiways were clogged. Idling planes wasted fuel. Angry passengers missed flights.
"The standard ground stop during severe weather was two hours," said Paul McCarthy, an airline pilot who often flies between Boston and Washington. "It was agony in the extreme. You'd push back from the gate on time, taxi to a remote part of the airport and set your parking brake. Passengers were packed in the back and they started sweating."
Often, airport control towers didn't have timely information. "Decisions were being made in a vacuum and we can't do that if we're going to have an integrated national transportation system," said McCarthy, who declined to identify his employer during a telephone interview.
There were 197,531 air traffic control delays between April and August last year, agency figures show. That was 36 percent higher than the same five-month period in 1998. Delays in July 1999 alone were up 76 percent over the year before.
"We had the worst summer last year in terms of delays. It's not a good record for us," FAA Administrator Jane Garvey said. "This is not the silver bullet. We're taking, I think, some immediate, short-term steps. Our long-range answer, clearly, is modernizing the system. That's why getting the resources to see that through is so important."
Garvey said representatives from the airlines, labor unions, controllers and regulators have met every Tuesday since last fall to find a way to deal with weather problems that were exacerbated last year by computer problems at a few of the FAA's 20 control centers.
As a plane flies across the sky, air traffic controllers in these centers transfer responsibility for the aircraft like a baton in a relay race. But these controllers can't see the big picture like FAA traffic planners in Herndon can - they sit at giant screens that show weather patterns and track all flights from takeoff to landing.
Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, is eager to see if the new plan will reduce delays, but he emphasized that it is no substitute for the FAA's $13 billion project to modernize the air traffic control system. And he said it will only work if the airlines are disciplined enough not to clog taxiways by letting planes leave gates out of turn.
"Everybody is going to have to play by the rules and not say, 'Whoops, I guess I'm now blocking you, United (airplane), but I really needed to clear that gate,"' Woerth said. "The amount of cooperation to make this plan work is going to be extraordinary. Nobody should be looking for a delay-free summer."
The Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, expects delays will be down this summer, but said the long-term solution is a modernized system that can handle an expanding fleet of planes.
"The FAA's system is broken," the group said in a report in October. "If it is not fixed, the resulting delays will virtually eliminate the dependability of airline schedules and the system will descend into gridlock."
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On the Net: Federal Aviation Administration: faa.gov
Air Transport Association: air-transport.org
Air Line Pilots Association: alpa.org |
