Airport Business News - North America

AirGuide Business, April 14, 2008

Apr 14, 2008

D.J. Gribbin, general counsel for the U.S. Department of Transportation, testifying on the topic of airline delays before the U.S. House of Representatives committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said the DoT is focusing on some short-term goals while not losing sight of the long-term objectives of establishing a sustainable and economically efficient aviation policy that actually reduces delays, not simply treats the symptoms by reforming "our economic model for air traffic control services and airport pricing similar to what the Administration proposed last year." He pointed out that the DoT seeks to overhaul of the FAA's financing structure to replace the decades old system of collecting ticket taxes with a stable, cost-based funding stream and to facilitate equipping the aviation system with modern Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) technology. Apr 11, 2008

U.S. Department of Transportation expects to complete the remaining nine recommended improvements by summer 2008. It also established an executive-level director position at the FAA to head the New York Area Program Integration Office. Gribbin said the FAA still believes in market-based measures to allocate capacity. He said the FAA will begin rolling out several elements of the NextGen system this summer. This rollout will include the national debut of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology in Florida. The ADS-B program will change the nation's air traffic control system from one that relies on radar technology to a system that uses precise location data from a global satellite network. The FAA has chosen Miami as the key site for installation and testing of two broadcast services of the ADS-B program -- Traffic Information Services -- Broadcast (TIS-B) and Flight Information Services-Broadcast (FIS-B). These broadcast services transmit weather and traffic information to the cockpit of properly equipped aircraft. The FAA plans to commission these broadcast services in November 2008 and can then begin nationwide deployment. Apr 11, 2008

A record number of air travelers is putting strain on heavily trafficked corridors around New York, Chicago and Atlanta, the inspector general said, noting that the bottleneck at the three major New York airports accounts for more than one-third of all flight delays around the United States. Because each airport has different reasons for delays, May said he opposed a "hard and fast" timeline for when an airplane needed to return to the gate if it had not taken off, as happened often last year. He called for the government to open military flight lanes to commercial aircraft during holiday travel periods, as President Bush ordered over Thanksgiving. Travelers can expect problems to continue through the rest of the year, Scovel said, especially if airlines, airports and government officials do not do more to reduce congestion. Even then, he said, important changes in the offing aren't scheduled to take effect until after the busy summer travel season. Apr 10, 2008

Both the House and Senate have approved short-term authority extensions for the FAA, giving senators more time to write a four-year reauthorization measure for the agency. While the House has already passed its authorization legislation, the Senate is still debating its version. Both chambers will need to work out the differences in their two measures before the June 30 extension expires. With competing legislative priorities in a contentious election year, additional extensions may jeopardize final passage before the end of the 110th Congress. Apr 10, 2008

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists unions blamed a March 30 radar outage at the air traffic control center in Augusta, GA on the new network. They said it took the contractor that built the network for the FAA, Harris Corporation, eight hours to dispatch a technician. FTI has been in development since 2002. The FAA said it provides a unified network for voice and data communications across all of its operations. The agency insists it's more reliable, and hence safer, than an older system that relied on a patchwork of disparate systems from numerous vendors. Safety questions about the FAA's new telecom system are the latest sign that it's going to be a rough summer for the aviation industry and its customers. Apr 10, 2008

The record number of delayed and canceled flights in 2007 can partly be blamed on airlines knowingly scheduling more flights than airports had the capacity to handle, according to a report released Wednesday by the Department of Transportation's inspector general. As an example, Inspector General Calvin L. Scovel III told a House aviation subcommittee that Northwest Airlines alone had scheduled 56 departures in a 15-minute window at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, about three times the number of planes that the airport has the capacity to handle. At six of 15 airports he studied, more flights were scheduled than the airport had the capacity to handle in ideal weather conditions. His report, presented at a hearing on chronic delays, was released on the same day that American Airlines canceled more than 1,000 flights to reinspect its fleet of MD-80 jets. Apr 10, 2008