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| Kathy and Steve Beard get massages at Boston's Logan International Airport on Tuesday after learning their flight to Atlanta
was delayed for 3-1/2 hours. Nicole Hill |
What airlines are doing to reduce record delays
With flight delays at a 13-year high, carriers feel pressure to make improvements – and still keep ticket prices low.
from the August 9, 2007 edition
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In a satiric YouTube posting called "Excursions with Edna," the Air Transport Association which represents the commercial carriers notes that the plane Edna took to her summer vacation paid $1,500 in fees to the FAA. While the corporate "big wig" who's private jet "went the same place and used the same services" paid only $120. The announcer notes that "Edna likes wearing big wigs, not subsidizing them" and urges people to call their congressman.
The private jet community argues that paying the same fees as commercial airlines could bankrupt many of their operations. Before Congress in July, Richard Shine, a board member of the National Business Aviation Association said they'd be willing to help pay their fair share to upgrade the air traffic control system, but not through user fees. They'd rather keep paying fuel taxes as they do now. "We want to pay at the pump – not through user fees or new taxes," he said.
Congress has to resolve the situation by the end of September, when the current FAA authorization expires. That will ultimately determine how much money there is to fix the aging air traffic control system. In the meantime, the FAA and the airlines have already begun instituting some pilot programs designed to shift the air traffic control system from its current 1950s-based radar navigation to satellite-based navigation. That's something that critics say is long over due: Rental cars with GPS systems have more advanced navigational aids than the FAA's air traffic control system.
In Alaska, Dallas and Atlanta the FAA has several pilot programs that are now using GPS to ease congestion. Right now, GPS can help with takeoffs and landings, and eventually it can make the entire system more efficient.
"It's much like a GPS unit in a car, it allows you to travel in a straighter line," says Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines. "In the current system you have to go from airport beacon to airport beacon. It's far out of line with what we could have in a modernized air traffic control system."
In other words, airlines now find themselves hopscotching from one air traffic control tower to another in what are very congested preordained highways in the sky. It's designed that way to ensure safety. Eventually, planes will be able to fly in more efficient point-to-point routes, and not compromise safety, according to Laura Brown of the FAA.
The long-term project is called "Next Generation" navigation by the FAA and it's still years in the making. In the meantime, the FAA is redesigning some of those highways in the skies – called the airspace – in some of the most congested areas of the country like the Northeast. That redesign could be finished and easing congestion there by the fall.
Until these changes take hold, there's some standard advice for travelers: "Take the early morning flights, they're the ones that have the best on-time performance," says Dean Breest, a spokesman from Northwest Airlines.
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