FAA Steps In to Ease Gridlock in the Skies

The airlines' pitiful records can be blamed on a variety of causes, but at the root there are simply too many scheduled flights for the nation's airports to handle. The number of passengers taking to the skies continues to increase—up 3.6% through September—while the number of available seat-miles has declined more than 12% since late 2005. But the number of flights is not falling to match the decline in seat-miles: the number of flights saw zero growth in 2005, a 2.8% decline in 2006, and 0.8% growth in 2007 through September.

What does all this mean? For one, load factors are historically high. Declining service standards do not just make flights feel fuller, they really are fuller. Domestic load factors topped 87% in both June and July, and exceeded 80% in another four months. By comparison, only 13 months had load factors above 80% in the previous 12 years combined.

But even more significant is the trend of smaller aircraft. Available seats can fall while total flights remain relatively even, because airlines have moved more and more to smaller jets. These are usually termed regional jets, but are taking on more and more routes that would be tough to describe as "regional." Carriers have found that a more-profitable business model calls for more frequent flights, even if they are on smaller aircraft. Thus, one flight on a Boeing 737 carrying 150 passengers becomes two flights on Embraer E-175s carrying 80 passengers apiece. While roughly the same number of passengers flies the route, the two smaller jets take up twice as many resources at the airport and in the air-traffic control system as the one larger flight. These added flights tend to be concentrated in peak times where demand is highest, and as a result, any small hiccup can turn an airport into a parking lot. Three of the five airlines with the worst on-time performances through November are regional affiliates of major carriers.

This is essentially what has happened at New York City's three major airports. Newark Liberty, JFK, and LaGuardia had especially atrocious records in an already woeful year. The eight most delayed flights in the nation all fly into or out of a New York City airport; ExpressJet (a Continental regional affiliate) flight 2979 from Hartford to Newark arrived late 88.5% of the time in November. As a major destination, delays in New York can result in delays across airlines' networks, especially for the already delay-prone Eastern seaboard.

Such a dismal state of affairs has resulted in the FAA stepping in to limit the number of takeoffs and landings (also known as slot controlling) at New York City's airports. LaGuardia is already limited to 81 flights per hour, but JFK and Newark will now receive similar restrictions. Newark's limits are forthcoming, but JFK caps will be set at 82 or 83 per hour. By comparison, 2007 summer peak hours saw more than 100 flights arriving and departing JFK per hour.

The airlines have welcomed the FAA's involvement. They recognize the problems in New York and the havoc it has wreaked throughout their networks, but antitrust regulations prevent them from colluding to ease gridlock. As a result, airlines will likely shift to larger aircraft and reduce the number of flights to the same destinations, move flights to less busy hours of the day, and route connecting flights to other hubs. Continental, for example, has been shifting some of its connections from its Newark hub to its Cleveland hub.

This is not the only way the FAA is actively looking to ease congestion. A major initiative on the table is the modernization of the nation's antiquated radar-based air-traffic control system to a satellite-based system. The current system puts a heavy burden on human controllers. To compensate for the weaknesses of humans and radar, flights are routed into indirect flight patterns like highways in the sky, descents are undertaken in a step fashion instead of gradually and steadily, and large buffer zones are required around aircraft for safety reasons. Once a more accurate satellite-based system comes online, aircraft will be able to fly in more direct paths, land more efficiently, and safely fly closer together to allow more planes into the airspace.

The air-traffic control update remains a long way away, however, and will not be in place until the middle of the next decade. The process will be very costly and airlines are currently fighting to shift more of the cost burden to civil aviation. Even once it is up and running, its biggest impact will be in the air—while much of the congestion happens on the ground. Depending on how the slot control experiment works in New York (it is currently set only through 2009) and the timetable for the air-traffic control upgrades, expect the FAA to play traffic cop for the nation's airports and airspace more often in the future.