Airlines (5)

Airlines are in concrete denial

The airlines just don't get it. Or they chose not to. The New York Times this Sunday quoted Air Transport Association spokesman David Castelveter saying, "You can have all the concrete you want — it's when you're up in the air that you have a space problem."

"That's a surprising pronouncement coming from an airline industry insider," said AOPA President Phil Boyer. "Congress, the FAA, and the entire aviation community have long recognized that runway capacity is the major factor limiting the ability to deal with the exploding numbers of airline flights at hub airports."

Simply put, there's a lot more room for aircraft in the three dimensions of airspace than the two dimensions of a limited number of runways. Pick any spot in the airspace, and you can have an aircraft at 1,000 feet, another at 2,000 feet, a third at 3,000 feet, etc. Pick any spot on the runway, and you can have exactly one aircraft there under the laws of physics and FAA regulations, Boyer said.

If it's not about the runways, why did the number of delayed flights at Atlanta drop 3 percent after the addition of a new runway in 2006?

If it's not the runways, then why is more runway capacity the critical element of the FAA's Operational Evolution Partnership to meet current and future air traffic demands?

"Since fiscal year 2000, FAA has provided about $1.7 billion in AIP (Airport Improvement Program) funding to increase capacity and decrease delays at the most congested airports in the country. These 13 new runway projects have provided these airports with the potential to accommodate 1.6 million more annual operations," FAA Administrator Marion Blakey said in testimony before Congress in May.

And if it's about the airspace, why didn't airline delays decrease noticeably in 2005 when the FAA doubled the amount of airspace available to airliners? That was the first year of RVSM (reduced vertical separation minima) in domestic U.S. airspace.

If you need any further evidence of the capacity of runways, look at the schedule below for one tiny segment of time at Chicago O'Hare International and ask yourself, how can 59 aircraft possibly arrive and depart in 14 minutes, unless it's in a universe where the amount of concrete doesn't matter.

August 28, 2007

H.R.2881 the way to pay for aviation fixes

The House FAA funding bill (H.R.2881) is the right way to pay for upgrading airports and the air traffic control system, AOPA said in a letter published in The Washington Post.

Responding to an editorial, AOPA President Phil Boyer wrote, "The fuel tax is an efficient, progressive way for general aviation to pay. The more pilots fly, the more they pay.

"The airlines are not interested in fairness. They're interested in reducing costs so they can increase profits for their shareholders. General aviation is the only player at the table agreeing to pay more to help modernize the air traffic control system."

The editorial unfortunately bought the airline's and FAA's contention that current taxes are "unfair."

But the newspaper did note that the "airlines schedule too many flights at peak times from hub airports."

Said Boyer, "Everyone in aviation agrees that air traffic control must be modernized. But new technology will not address the two main causes of airline delays: weather and too many aircraft using too few runways."

H.R.2881 would "give the FAA the money it needs to modernize and make needed investments for air transportation across the country," he wrote. AOPA is reaching out to editorial boards across the country to explain the facts about FAA funding and airline delays.

The Chicago Tribune and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for instance, both ran AOPA's letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece by Jim May, president of the Air Transport Association.