Ask the pilot

Airport congestion and flight delays are making travelers insane. A look at what will and won't solve the problem.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Oct. 5, 2007 | On Sept. 28 I woke to the following headline: "Bush Pressures FAA to Act on Flight Delays." With the number of commercial flights soaring to an all-time high, congestion at airports has never been worse. So far, 2007 has been the most delay-plagued year since the government began keeping records, punctuated by a disastrous summer that delayed or stranded tens of millions of people around the country. Even with the low season approaching, there is little relief in sight. Coverage of the crisis has been persistent, with passengers, pundits and politicians expressing frustration and disgust. Now the president has joined the chorus.

"There's a lot of anger amongst our citizens," said President Bush during an Oval Office meeting with Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and Federal Aviation Administration head Bobby Sturgell. "We understand there's a problem. And we're going to address the problem."

That's typically thin rhetoric from our fearless leader, and considering his track record on certain other crises, it's perhaps better if he stays on the sidelines. Nevertheless, he seems to get the point. A call to action has been sorely needed, and maybe a nudge from the top will get things moving. Following their meeting, Secretary Peters acknowledged the urgent need for reform, openly admitting the possibility of imposing mandatory flight reductions at the hardest-hit airports. Other ideas, such as peak-period pricing schemes, are also on the table.

Knowing which proposals might actually help, and which are likely to fail, requires an understanding of how we got to this position in the first place. For the most part, the existing problem is not the result of air traffic control shortcomings, bad weather or any of the excuses passengers are used to hearing. It's an airline scheduling issue, plain and simple. Carriers have created this mess through a self-defeating insistence that frequency of flights is the ultimate key to success. Over the past several years, they have portioned capacity onto smaller and smaller planes making more and more departures. The results of this strategy can be seen on any afternoon at airports such as JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Washington National, where small regional jets (RJs) account for up to half of all takeoffs and landings. It is not the total volume of passengers slowing things down, it's the inefficient way they are divvied up. In some places, 50 percent of the traffic is carrying a quarter of the people.

How bad does it get? Two weeks ago I was working a flight from Europe to JFK. We landed shortly after 5 p.m. -- several minutes ahead of schedule, ironically -- only to spend the next two hours -- two hours -- taxiing from the end of the runway to our parking position. Our assigned gate was open and available the entire time, but the airport had become a spaghetti snarl of planes. Taxiways were blocked; aprons, clogged. It was literally gridlock -- with scores of 50- and 70-seat RJs jockeying for space with A340s and 747s.

Assuming the airlines will not police themselves into submission, we've reached a point where government involvement is perhaps the best option -- specifically, a mandatory cap on departures at the busiest airports during specific time periods. That's a bold step, but the remaining choices hold comparatively little promise. Let's review some of the commonly suggested alternatives.

1. We need to modernize air traffic control.

Indeed we do. Our ATC system is antiquated and inefficient. Congress is weighing a bill that would use an increased jet fuel tax to fund a systemwide upgrade to satellite-based technology. Said the Wall Street Journal Sept. 27, "Airlines and regulators agree that this upgrade will do much to ease congestion and cut down on delays."

Except that it wouldn't. Though enhancements are long overdue, they would primarily benefit the higher altitude, en-route airspace sectors, with minimal impact where it is needed most -- in and around airports. Benefits would include shorter flight times, fuel savings, reduced emissions and somewhat better traffic management during inclement weather. Those are all good things, but they ignore the fact that a runway can accept only so many arrivals and departures per hour. Taxiways too are easily saturated. Ultimately, we're dealing not with an airspace problem so much as a ground-space problem. Go back for a moment to my two-hour taxi-in at Kennedy. It had nothing to do with airspace or ATC.

There are a few places where airborne flow enhancements can, and have, paid dividends. At Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, a metering program implemented by Delta has helped cut delays by assigning precise en-route time slots for arriving planes. But this is a Delta innovation, not a government program, and owing to its massive size and number of runways, Atlanta is an easier place to work with than more constricted airports.

2. So why not build more runways?

For lots of reasons, not the least of which are the long and contentious battles that runway construction projects inevitably trigger among airport authorities, politicians and anti-expansion neighborhood groups. At my hometown airport, Boston's Logan International, it took 30 years to get a badly needed, 5,000-foot stub of a runway completed.

No less daunting are the funding and technical issues. Taxiways have to be constructed; complex lighting systems installed; navigational aids put in place; flight patterns developed and test-flown. At Denver, the opening of a sixth runway carried a tab of $165 million. Denver, at least, had the room. A runway suitable for heavier jets needs to be two miles long. At LaGuardia? At Kennedy? At Newark or Washington National? Where would it fit?

Next page: Can't we charge airlines more to fly at the busiest times?