Airline woes may increase with traffic
Detroit News
The figures are jolting. By the year 2011, U.S. airlines, under some estimates, will be carrying nearly 1 billion passengers a year, up 46 percent.
That means an additional 3,000 jets will eventually be needed, as well as more runways, taxiways and gates.
Airlines are at the heart of a lifestyle shift, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and others are having trouble keeping up.
The solution, say some reformers, is to privatize non-safety duties of air traffic control and make it more efficient and modern. The FAA's lack of funds and overabundance of bureaucratic red tape are keeping it from responding to the pending crunch, they say.
Example: Think of the FAA if an inbound flight is delayed during foul weather at Detroit Metro Airport's new facility, scheduled to open later this year. The $1.3 billion project won't include a $12 million precision radar that would permit simultaneous landings on the parallel runways that are 3,000 feet apart.
The FAA hasn't slated the airport to get it, even though the technology has been approved for smaller ones around the country.
"That's a good example of how absurd the system is," said Robert Poole, California-based paladin of air traffic control reform. "That's what happens when you depend on appropriations from the federal budget. That radar is not an experiment. It is something that is approved, production-line equipment, and any airport that needs one should have it now."
Last year, passengers were delayed on 450,289 U.S. flights. Some 68 percent were weather delays, a number privatization backers say could be improved with updated equipment. About 14 percent of the delays are blamed on the sheer volume of traffic. Equipment and other failures cause the rest.
Traditional air traffic control, by the year 2005 or before, is expected to run out of allocated radio frequencies. A new system will be needed, perhaps "free flight," which allows airlines to use satellite positioning systems to fly directly to destinations without using the FAA-established airways.
"Free flight" could speed passengers to the destinations more quickly, but backers say the FAA is moving slowly on making it viable.
Privatization is billed as a way to solve such wrangles — a consumer-driven system to match technical innovation to the demands of a growing industry.
Flight delays are caused by a variety of problems — air traffic control deficiencies, too few runways, too few gates and factors more controlled by government agencies than by airlines themselves.
Kenneth Mead, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said the demands on air control capacity seem never to end.
"It is like filling up a glass," he said. "As soon as you empty out some of the water, you pour more back in. And it is almost as though we are treading water. All these planes in the air, you have to have a place to put them. And you cannot underestimate the importance of the ground infrastructure."
Bottom line: Federal and local governments are barely keeping up.
"I am not sure that we gave the FAA a task that is accomplishable," said Darryl Jenkins, director of the Aviation Institute at George Washington University
"The FAA is good at regulating safety. The mindset that it takes to regulate safety is not the same mindset it takes to do technology. I think it is unfair that we saddled them with that.
"Everything that we need to do in terms of capacity requires governmental action at some level. That's scary when you think about it. The government seldom acts until you are beyond the crisis point."
