The *real* problem
In his regular "Ask The Pilot" column on Salon.com, Patrick Smith lays it out:
Two weeks ago I was on a plane going from Washington Reagan to LaGuardia. It was a clear, warm, windless day. We pushed back shortly after 10 a.m., only to find ourselves in a holding bay at the far end of the airport, hit with a 90-minute takeoff delay. Ninety minutes' wait, for a flight that would barely last 40. When the controller was asked about the reason, he responded dryly: "The usual. Volume."Read the full column... (You may need to view a brief ad if you don't subscribe to the site.)Volume. What he meant is that the Northeast corridor had become saturated -- now an almost daily occurrence, even in good weather. Throw in storms or low visibilities, and waits can extend for hours. Airlines will tell you this is an ATC issue. But is it? True, the en route sectors of airspace could be better utilized, for instance by taking greater advantage of GPS technology and reducing the horizontal distance limits between aircraft. But in the end, you can squeeze only as many arrivals into and out of a major airport as its runways will allow. The airspace issue ultimately becomes an airport issue.
posted by Jeb Burnside at
8:01 AM
3 Comments:
Possibly, but his solution is to put more people in larger aluminum mailing tubes and get less planes in the sky. In his last two columns he seems to say that too many planes is the problem - from that attitude I'm taking it that he is no friend of General Aviation. Sure we can go to smaller airports, but if we use the 'system' we're still getting in the way of his beloved Airliners.
To a certain extent, putting more people in larger human mailing tubes is the only answer -- but only at airports with no way to increase runway acceptance rate -- the hourly take-off-and-landing capacity.
ADS-B and NextGen may help with increasing runway acceptance rate if the FAA uses it in a way that decreases in-trail and departure/arrival spacing...but even airports with the best capacity can only handle so much before wake turbulence imposes its own physics-driven limits.
Besides, if you totally eliminated GA from most of these Class B airports, nothing would change in the way of delays and ATC issues -- as evidenced during the closure of DCA to GA traffic, and continuing today with only minuscule GA traffic.
Finally, even if you could improve existing airport capacity 50 percent, before long the airlines would be scheduling 75 percent additional flights...
Overscheduling became a problem at major airports not long after the airlines were deregulated; it was already a spin problem for the airlines in the mid-1980s, when
i wrote for Air Transport World Magazine. The carriers they know it's true, as do the feds, the airports people and those who cover the airline industry -- like David Field at Airline Business -- know it...and say it.
Not that I (ahem) have any strong feelings about this debate...
I don't disagree with you or The Pilot on this point. And perhaps I'm reading him wrong, but his past couple of columns have read to me as if he's claiming it's more than just a too-many-planes-at-the-big-airport problem. I read him as saying that there are too many planes in the entire system and I worry that he's leaving some blame to fall on GA as well. Even if he's not, it can read that way to the layman.
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