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 July 26, 2001 
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| JIM LEHRER: Now, the
second of two reports on airline delays. This week the Federal Aviation
Administration reported fewer delayed flights this summer. How and why
did that happen? Tom Bearden reports.
TOM BEARDEN: For a few months last year, New York's La Guardia Airport was the national poster child for the frustrating problem of air delays. From early morning to late at night, almost every flight was late. One quarter of all the flight delays in the entire country were happening at La Guardia. It happened after a new law called Air 21 lifted a cap on takeoffs and landings that had been in place at the overcrowded airport for years. The intent was to give more access to smaller cities and airlines. But the response went beyond anyone's predictions. The number of daily flights went from 1064 to almost 1400. The airport was simply unable to move all those planes on time. PASSENGER: In and out of La Guardia, it's always delayed. I always expect to be delayed and to have extra time to blow at the airport. PASSENGER: I fly almost every weekend, and this airport's the one I least like to come in and out of. TOM BEARDEN: At a recent congressional hearing in New York, some placed the blame directly on airline behavior. REP. ANTHONY WEINER: The Air 21 bill, something that I supported, has proven to be a failure because of the frankly piggish attitudes of the airlines. TOM BEARDEN: The President of delta airlines thinks what happened was inevitable, but unsustainable. FREDERICK W. REID, President, Delta Air Lines: Every company, of course, had their passengers saying, "we want service, we want this many frequencies to this many cities on day one," so everybody started to do that. And had any single airline not done that, then nine other airlines would have done the same thing. Now, collectively speaking, it did harm the efficiency of the airport as a whole, so the FAA took collective action and dramatically reduced that growth number so that the airport would operate in its collective efficiency. TOM BEARDEN: That action, by the Federal Aviation Administration, was to set up a temporary lottery that immediately cut the number of new flights by half. But some say the spectacle of an airport strangled by its own popularity was just an extreme example of a larger problem: The tendency of big airlines to schedule more flights that some airports can physically accommodate. Ken Mead is inspector general for the Department of Transportation. KENNETH M. MEAD, Inspector General, DOT: I do think that the scheduling practices at probably not... About ten airports in this country are having a cascading effect throughout the rest of the country. SPOKESMAN: Flight 99, Gate c-106. TOM BEARDEN: Some call the practice over scheduling, but many airline executives, like Delta's Scott Yohe, deny that it exists. D. SCOTT YOHE, Vice President, Delta Air Lines: To suggest that there is over scheduling suggests that we're flying airplanes around that have a lot of empty seats on them, and that's simply not the case. I think the airline schedules, if you look historically, how they've been built, they have matched up almost perfectly with the kind of demand and the growth that we've seen over the past two decades. TOM BEARDEN: But the smaller airlines say over scheduling does exist, and that it's used to hurt competitors. Ed Faberman heads the Air Carrier Association, which represents those carriers. ED FABERMAN, Air Carrier Association of America: If I have three flights a day in a market, and all of a sudden you have 15 or 20 flights a day in the market, it certainly does hurt me because frequency is important to a lot of travelers. TOM BEARDEN: One big carrier we talked to denies that over scheduling even exists. It says they run high load factors. It's clear that there is demand for those flights. ED FABERMAN: I think if you look at some of the DOT data, you'll see that load factors on some of these flights are in the 50% to 60% area, where high load factors are 60%, 70%, 80%. What they've done is they've significantly reduced seats and they put a 50-seat aircraft out there and if they put 20 people on the aircraft, I guess they can say they're happy with the load factor. TOM BEARDEN: Faberman points to the rapidly growing popularity of those 50-seat regional jets as part of the problem. Most airlines are using them to add jet service to hundreds of smaller cities that want flights to already crowded big airports. But when does that additional service overwhelm the airport? Surprisingly, until this spring, there was no official measurement of a given airport's actual capacity. In April, the FAA released a benchmark report that charted the number of take-offs and landings that 31 of the nation's busiest airports could safely handle. It showed, for example, that San Francisco could accommodate about 95 operations in good weather, but only about 70 in bad weather. At O'Hare, it was 200 in good, 160 in bad. When the report compared each airport's capacity with the actual flight schedule, the graphs showed that flights exceeded capacity at eight big city airports at least some part of the day, even when the weather was good. JANE GARVEY, FAA Administrator: The report confirms what you as frequent fliers know intuitively, and that is that there are a handful of airports where demand is either at capacity or exceeds capacity. And where, in adverse conditions, the resulting delays have impacts throughout the system. TOM BEARDEN: FAA administrator Jane Garvey never explicitly accused the airlines of over scheduling, but the air transport association, which represents the country's big airlines, felt that over scheduling was strongly implied. Carol Hallet is President of the ATA. CAROL B. HALLETT, President, Air Transport Association: Benchmarking does use certain days, implying that scheduling was the problem when, in fact, it had nothing to do with scheduling. It was, in fact, the airspace that was full. TOM BEARDEN: If you look at what the government has decided, rightly or wrongly, as the capacity of an airport and if the curve of departures exceeds that line, then that is a scheduling problem. CAROL B. HALLETT: No, it is a problem of infrastructure, and it starts with not having sufficient taxiways, not having enough runways. And the answer is this: In 1990, the FAA came out with their annual forecast and they said in the year 2000 there would be 700 million passengers flying in the United States. The airlines went out, they bought airplanes in preparation to meet the FAA's forecast. We had the airplanes. The FAA did not have the technology online, they did not have the runways online, and the airports themselves were not able to handle the number of passengers that are coming into the airports, and the demand that there is to get them into the sky. SPOKESPERSON: United 998, headed for departure. TOM BEARDEN: The FAA has been working on infrastructure. In June it unveiled its Operational Evolution Plan, which spells out what parts of the whole system have to be expanded and where over the next ten years. It calls for redesigning the airways, the invisible highways in the sky between airports. The FAA is also moving away from ground-based radars to direct pilots and toward independent cockpit navigation systems using satellites. The FAA says all of this will increase the airspace system's capacity by some 30% by 2011, but Ed Faberman is highly skeptical. ED FABERMAN: The measures we're talking about are not going to dramatically increase capacity. They will help, and we should be taking every step we can do to help and if it means another three or four operations, or 1% increase, that's fine. But it's not going to be dramatic. TERREE BOWERS: FAA Associate administrator Steven Brown disagrees. STEVEN J. BROWN, FAA Associate Administrator: We have a very specific plan that lays out airport by airport, runway by runway, and airspace segment by airspace segment across the country the exact procedural changes we can make, the technology we can deploy, and the construction that can be undertaken to make sure that we have those measured changes in capacity. TOM BEARDEN: The plan also calls for building new runways at 15 airports. But the FAA doesn't control runway construction, local airport authorities do, and local opposition often makes it impossible to build them. STEVEN J. BROWN: There will be some airports in this country where it may not be possible to expand the capacity on the ground. And in those cases we will do everything we can at the FAA to expand the capacity in the airspace to better serve that airport, that ultimately there may be some airports that cannot grow to meet the future demand. TOM BEARDEN: La Guardia is one example of where more runways aren't an option. It's surrounded by dense urban neighborhoods. So the FAA is looking at ways to manage demand at La Guardia. They're discussing charging higher landing fees for peak time periods. Also on the table, imposing minimum aircraft sizes, and an auction of landing rights to the highest bidder. Yet airports like La Guardia, conveniently close to downtown business districts, are precisely the places where passengers want to fly. The airlines strongly oppose all of these ideas. ROBERT A. HAZEL, Vice President, USAirways: The notion that the various options outlined in the FAA's notice will, in fact, reduce congestion at La Guardia is highly questionable and certainly unproven. What is more certain, however, is that congestion-based pricing and our auction schemes will force airlines to raise fares with no improvement in service to customers. TOM BEARDEN: But DOT's Ken Mead says those changes may be needed at many more airports than La Guardia. KENNETH MEAD: The traveling public may have to be willing to fly at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. And the airlines correspondingly may have to adjust their schedules to accommodate that. SPOKESMAN: 1571, your pushback sequence will be northbound 727... TOM BEARDEN: Several airlines have already made schedule changes on their own to lessen congestion. For example, this spring Delta spread out the times when flights arrive and leave at its Atlanta hub this spring. The flights used to come in in ten groups per day, each with as many as 90 aircraft. In April, they changed that to 70 flights, 12 times a day. Continental Airlines did something similar at its hub in Newark; so did American at Dallas-Fort Worth. Some airlines are also seeking exemption from antitrust laws that prevent them from consulting with competitors, hoping that cooperative scheduling might reduce peak demand. But Delta's Scott Yohe rejects any kind of changes enforced by law. D. SCOTT YOHE: I don't think that the government nor the carriers want to tell anyone, you know, what time of day you can fly. It's just like with the gasoline crisis that we saw in this country. We don't want to be in a position of saying, you know, "Tony, you can only fly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays." I mean, we think we should build a system that allows you to fly the days that you want to fly, the times you want to fly. The debate will probably grow in importance as the La Guardia solutions take effect. The FAA has been careful to remind people that its demand management proposals are limited to La Guardia only. But congressman John Mica, who chairs the Aviation Subcommittee, thinks they may be needed elsewhere. REP. JOHN MICA: Whatever solutions we determine is good for La Guardia-- I want to say today-- I believe should be applied to other congested airports across the nation. What's good enough for New York is good enough for the rest of the country. TOM BEARDEN: That view, from an influential lawmaker, is one reason some say that whatever solution eventually emerges at La Guardia will likely provide the blueprint for other airports facing similar congestion in the future. |
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