FORUM COLUMN
By Michael L. Dworkin
This article appears on Page 6
By now, you've probably recovered from the chaos of the holidays. In case you haven't experienced it enough in the past month, imagine everyone driving massive sport utility vehicles, each filled with eight people - children, bags, games and eggnog lattes - all trying to move around and park in the same five-block area. Surely someone is responsible for the lack of a systematic method of dealing with all of this traffic and congestion. But who? Macy's? General Motors? The Chamber of Commerce? Shoppers? Of course not.
The same is true for today's airports.
More than 740 million passengers flew within the United States in 2006, the most recent year in which statistics are available. By 2015, that number is expected to reach 1 billion. These numbers far exceed the wildest dreams of those who designed and built our airport system.
Although local civic leaders pride themselves on the construction of gleaming 21st-century terminal facilities, once you get past the jetway, our airports are anything but. They're aging - and not very gracefully. The last major air carrier airport built in the United States, Denver International, went into service 13 years ago. Our second-youngest, Dallas-Fort Worth, is three decades old. In terms of runway and taxiway layout, you could use San Francisco International as the backdrop for filming "Airport 1937," when the biggest thing flying was a DC-3 holding 30 people.
Although traffic has skyrocketed (no pun intended), there has been no commensurate increase in airport facilities, causing delays and cancellations and creating potentially dangerous incursions into otherwise-protected aircraft movement areas.
Although the number and rate of incursions declined since peaking in 2001, preliminary data for 2007 indicates that the overall incursion rate will regress to the 2001 peak.
Have industry, government and airports prepared for this expansion? The answer is a resounding "No." Is there a comprehensive fix? Not in the short term.
First, the issue should be put in perspective. The problem is not endemic to all of the nation's airports. The United States has 5,200 public airports. Of those, only 820 serve air carriers, and of those, only 50 have acute delay and ground congestion problems. But this relatively small number is responsible for 80 percent of passenger traffic. When delays hit one of those 50 airports, there is not a ripple effect but a tsunami on the rest of the system.
Second, the problem is not caused by overscheduling. Airlines don't make money when their planes fly empty. Get on an air carrier flight and what's the first thing you notice? It's full. Airlines are merely responding to market demand.
Third, it's not the airports alone. Airports are merely the initiating and concluding termini of the national airspace pipeline - a system that is equally overburdened.
Fourth, although the federal government owns and operates the airspace, airports themselves are owned and operated by local governments and airport authorities. Local governments are the airport proprietors and are responsible for constructing and maintaining facilities sufficient to accommodate the transportation services that are provided to their respective airports.
So what is the cause of the problem? The same thing responsible for crumbling roads and freeways, collapsing bridges and failed levees: the failures to adequately maintain the infrastructure that we have, to plan for and invest in the future and to administer those projects that we have undertaken.
A few cases in point:
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the federal agency charged with the regulation of air safety, 54 percent of airport runway and taxiway incursions for fiscal years 2003 through 2006 were caused by pilot error, 29 percent were caused by air traffic control error and 17 percent were caused by vehicle operator or pedestrian error. Contributing to these errors are a number of factors, including airport complexity, frequency of runway crossings, amount of air traffic, miscommunications and judgment errors between flight crews and air traffic control and lack of situational awareness by flight crews.
Many of these problems can be remedied easily by making airports more user-friendly: changing markings, signage and lighting and providing more pilot training (which the airlines have done even though our air carrier pilots are the best trained in history. In fact, the number of airline mishaps attributed to pilot error have declined significantly over the past two decades). Other solutions include more training for air traffic control personnel, upgrading the traffic control system (currently behind schedule and over budget) and changing airport layouts (necessitating extensive environmental review and risking litigation).
Currently, 21 of 47 runways at the 10 busiest U.S. air carrier airports did not meet FAA runway safety area standards. The FAA has not updated its runway safety plan in five years, despite its own policy for this to be done every two to three years.
Air traffic control error is the second leading cause of aircraft incursions. But the traffic control workforce is dwindling, and those who remain are frequently overworked and fatigued. A new record in air traffic control retirements and attrition was set in 2007: 7.4 percent of the total experienced controller workforce, the largest mass exodus of personnel since 1981, when President Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers. This is the fourth straight year that the FAA has come up short on predicting retirements, surpassing its own projections by 33 percent. We're left with both a 15-year low in the number of fully certified controllers on the job and a glut of new hires.
The president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association recently told the FAA administrator, "The worsening loss of veteran controller talent, experience and savvy in our nation's airport towers andradar centers is a complete hemorrhaging of the FAA's lifeblood."
A recent Government Accountability Office report confirmed these fears. "Air traffic controller fatigue continues to be a human factor issue affecting runway safety. ... We found that, as of May 2007, at least 20 percent of the controllers at 25 air traffic control facilities, including towers at several of the country's busiest airports, were regularly working 6-day weeks," the report said.
To handle safely the volumes of traffic in the air and on the ground, the FAA has been attempting to modernize air traffic control and the airspace system. These modernization programs have been plagued by delays and cost overruns, have yet to be implemented nationwide and, in those limited situations in which they have been implemented, have failed to perform as advertised. For example, to improve runway safety, the FAA has deployed a new electronic sensory system called Airport Movement Area Safety System to provide air traffic controllers with identification, position information and alerts of potential ground collision. But according to a recent GAO report, as of July 2007, the FAA had expended $314 million (57 percent of the planned funding) and obligated $378 million (69 percent) for this program but had deployed only nine of 35 systems for operational use. Of those deployed, GAO found decreased reliability in poor weather conditions and a defect in the technology that does not allow it to work on intersecting runways and converging taxiways. Even if these problems can be rectified, how is the FAA going to implement remaining systems with less than half of the remaining funds?
Other means of minimizing delays and creating safer airport surfaces include construction of perimeter taxiways circling all runways, thus minimizing if not stopping aircraft from crossing active runways. Sounds simple, but these are expensive, complicated and time-consuming improvements. They are almost certain to precipitate environmental lawsuits, which undoubtedly will result in at least temporary suspensions of work. Airports are by no means gardens of Eden. They are noisy and congested, and they generate emissions and fumes. Even with technology improvements, carbon-based fuels are going to be with us for some time, and unwanted byproducts of aviation activity are inevitable.
Airport congestion and its concomitant safety problems are not going to be solved by a Balkanized approach. The GAO concluded, "The absence of coordination and national leadership impedes further progress on runway safety because no single office is taking charge of assessing the causes of runway safety problems and taking the steps needed to address those problems."
No matter how many plans are implemented or technologies are created, without this, nothing will be done.
Michael L. Dworkin is an attorney in San Francisco specializing in aviation law.
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