AIR TRAFFIC BOTTLENECK
July 10, 2001

Tom Bearden examines the reasons for crowded flights and long delays at airports.

 

July 5, 2001: Lower fares on a new travel Web site April 12, 2001: Transportation Secretary Mineta on the airline industry Jan. 2, 2001: The new heads of Transportation, Labor and Energy Jan. 10, 2001: Industry experts discuss the sale of TWA to American Airlines Dec. 21, 2000: Dissatisfaction with air travel Sept. 11, 2000: The search for skilled airline mechanics Aug. 22, 2000: The NTSB's meeting on TWA flight 800 Aug. 10, 2000: Weather delays and labor hamper United July 26, 2000: A report on the crash of the Concorde July 19, 2000: A summer of delays and cancellations May 24, 2000: United Airlines and U.S. Airways announce a merger March 22, 2000: The impact of the Boeing strike Sept. 1, 1999: The FAA addresses airline delays Sept. 1, 1999: A discussion with two experts about flight delays Aug. 19, 1999: Carry-on luggage dangers Feb. 15, 1999: American Airlines pilots stage a "sick-out" Dec. 29, 1998: A report on the layoffs at Boeing in Seattle June 15, 1998: Air fares Browse the NewsHour's coverage of transportation   U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration	TOM BEARDEN: It always seems to happen at the worst time: Harried parents, kids and bags in tow, camped out at an overheated waiting area at the airport anxious to get on the plane, only to be told at the last minute that their flight won't be leaving on time. Last summer it happened a lot more often than normal: one in every four flights was delayed by an average of 50 minutes. PASSENGER: It's really been a hassle because, I mean, we have business to take care of at home and this is about the fifth or sixth time that our flight has been rearranged or canceled or delayed due to the hassle. TOM BEARDEN: That frustration was equally evident on Capitol Hill. REP. HAROLD ROGERS: Frankly, over the last couple of years, there have been a lot of hearings, a lot of public statements about the delay problem, but there's been more finger pointing than real progress. It makes one think that this is a dysfunctional family. TOM BEARDEN: Everyone who participated in this House hearing said they wanted to reduce delays, but all of the players have their own priorities. Some say the U.S. needs 50 miles of new runways. Some think the government's air traffic control system needs a radical overhaul. Some argue that the airlines need to stop scheduling so many flights at the same time. Delta's President, Fred Reid, says the airlines are victims of their own success. FRED REID: You have about 670 million people, just in this country alone, who are going to want to fly this year. And you're going to have about a billion passengers flying by 2009, or even earlier. Those passengers are born and they're walking around and they are coming, whether we like it or not.
	The busiest airport
	TOM BEARDEN: This is busiest airport on earth, Atlanta's Hartsfield, on the Thursday before the big Memorial Day travel crunch. It's days like this when the system gets its toughest workout. Even so, most of Delta's flights were on time, in spite of the extra-heavy passenger load. Much of the credit for that smooth performance goes to the people who work in Delta's operations control center, a huge, windowless room on the outskirts of the field. Spend a day here, a day in which Delta flew 360,000 people, and you'll have a hard time escaping the sense that the major cause of airline delays is weather. Weather dominates the talk at four daily planning meetings, where every part of Delta's system is represented: Reservations, maintenance, customer service, crew scheduling, international operations, aircraft routing, and so on. When Delta's managers gathered for the first meeting of the day, weather in the Northeast was causing major delays at New York's LaGuardia Airport. Some flights had to be canceled. DELTA MANAGER: We do have ground delay program in place for LaGuardia. We have done some selective thinning of our operation and we reduced delays to a max of 60 minutes for LaGuardia operations, which is acceptable. The outlook for the afternoon, we will continue to have low ceilings and visibility issues throughout the Northeast in the New York airports. TOM BEARDEN: Obviously there's nothing new about bad weather. But more and more aircraft flying through the same airspace make weather problems far more disruptive to the system as a whole than ever before. A single line of thunderstorms can back up planes halfway across the country. Diane Boone works for the Center for Advanced Aviation Systems Development, the FAA's think tank for air traffic. She's developed a computer program that illustrates the cascade effect. DIANE BOONE: This was a day of June 2, 2000, last year, where we had a thunderstorm line that had slowly marched across the country and was blocking some of the traffic coming into the New York area, for example, here. So what was planned was then to move the New York traffic flows South, down through a route through holes in the thunderstorms into the Indianapolis center and then back up into New York. Well the difficulty, as you can see on this screen, is moving those flows have actually created congestion with the Washington metro arrivals, both in Cleveland Center, where it's now crossing the Washington arrivals, and also at Washington Center. If there's other traffic coming, for example, from the Southwest, in order to alleviate some of this congestion going in to Washington Center, you then have to reroute the traffic a little bit further South. Then what that creates is... The route is, you move the traffic now so it flies right over Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, which now creates a congestion problem just over Atlanta for departures getting out of Atlanta. Plus it's the same route for flights going into the Washington area from Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. TOM BEARDEN: This is where these traffic jams get sorted out-- the federal aviation administration's command center, near Washington. Its mission is to provide coordination among all the airlines and manage the entire air traffic system, watching thousands of flights and weather patterns around the country. They don't directly control airplanes, but rather set the direction and make routing plans for regional and local control centers that do. Every two hours, the command center holds a conference call with the centers and the major airlines to discuss the current weather and traffic situation. SPOKESMAN: Delta's on. TOM BEARDEN: Delta's Bill Miret took part, but did more listening than talking. SPOKESMAN: The thunderstorms are below the parameters of our coverage areas. Most people feel it's going to be a later event today rather than an earlier event. TOM BEARDEN: The command center saw lines of storms developing across the Midwest. It has a series of so-called playbooks-predesigned plans for rerouting traffic in case of weather. But after talking to the airlines, they decided to make only small, tactical changes in routing. SPOKESMAN: We're talking about keeping it tactical here, rather than putting in playbooks based on the C.C.S.T. I'm looking for your concurrence. SPOKESMAN: Oh, yeah, that's fine. Thanks. SPOKESMAN: Delta agrees with you guys, too. SPOKESMAN: So we're going to move these routes into the short term again, making the severe weather in the centers triggers on this tactical reroutes and possible utilization of playbooks. TOM BEARDEN: It all sounds smoothly collaborative. But at the end of last summer, many airlines wondered whether the FAA was being too sensitive to weather.
	Caution and delays
	JACK RYAN: We believe that FAA, in many cases, treated these projected places where we're going to have activity as no-fly zones. So they rerouted airplanes around those forecasted areas when the possibility of that turning into a real thunderstorm was probably less than 50 percent most of the time. TOM BEARDEN: Many, including Delta's vice president for operational planning, think such over-caution produced needless delays. BILL WAMGERIEN: We would have our view on a given day whether they... The actions taken in the way of ground delay programs or reroutes or so forth could have been later, could have been earlier, could have been less. And there's some feeling that, yeah, we were very aggressive and the FAA was very conservative around instituting programs to manage traffic. TOM BEARDEN: Steven Brown is the agency's chief for air traffic. TOM BEARDEN: But you don't think it was too conservative last summer? STEVEN BROWN: The FAA certainly has a bias toward a safe system, and we recognize that we need to have more efficiency, fewer delays, because we know passengers are frustrated with delays. But we're only going to do those improvements consistent with maintaining safety. TOM BEARDEN: Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta had his own suspicions about the delays of the last two years. NORMAN MINETA: The fact that in 1998 we allowed... We put the weather radar on the scope that the air traffic controllers are looking at. And I think what has happened is that now that they see the yellows and the oranges and reds like we see on our nightly news when we get our weather report, that they are saying, "well, we'll delay planes from coming into yellow areas." And we think they are just being too cautious in terms of weather. TOM BEARDEN: The FAA responded to airline complaints by trying to reach a common standard for weather judgment. Thousands of controllers, managers, and airline personnel were trained over the winter and spring. In the short term, the FAA has also redesigned some of the airspace in the Northeast to relieve some of the so-called choke points where too many planes are funneled into the same place. The command center began using more sophisticated computerized management tools to sequence planes and measure flow through airspace. The agency also has a long-term master plan called the Operational Evolution Plan, designed to improve the entire system. FAA Administrator Jane Garvey says it's a slow, deliberately piecemeal process. JANE GARVEY: It lays out a ten-year commitment for the FAA, for the airlines, and for the airports. It includes runways; it includes technologies, and procedural improvements. Simply put, this plan sets forth a blueprint to move us toward satellite navigation and to move us as an industry, with supporting procedural changes and airspace redesign. MAN: How about the weather outlook? TOM BEARDEN: Back at the Delta operations center, the weather at LaGuardia had improved when the airline held its afternoon teleconference. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: New York has finally lifted up the ceilings a little bit more than we have seen. However here in Atlanta... I think we're going to be all right. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: LaGuardia has a ground delay for most of the day today, due to ceilings and visibility. As bill mentioned, the conditions have improved there. We just talked to them and hopefully their arrival rate is 32 right now, hopefully to raise it up over 40. TOM BEARDEN: Delta finished the day with 42 cancellations out of 2,500 flights and an on time arrival rate of 79 percent, just below the company's internal goal of 80 percent. The afternoon duty director believes the improved relationship with the FAA has helped. JOE TURNER: It seems like that air traffic has actually handled the situation better this year, for the most part, than I've seen them handle it. Of course we've had excellent weather this year, but I have seen a couple of red situations where they look like they did a better job. TOM BEARDEN: As Memorial Day came and went, on-time performance data for this summer shows improvement. The number of flights delayed in March was down 7% from the previous year; in April it was 15%; May, 1%; and 14% for June. A number of FAA and airline officials who once called themselves cautiously optimistic are now dropping the caution and flatly predicting a better travel season for the entire summer.