LaGuardia Flunks FAA's Capacity Study

<B>LaGuardia Flunks FAA's Capacity Study</B>

By Barbara Cook

<I>Washington - </I>The Federal Aviation Administration has released a study profiling the capacity of the nation's 30 busiest airports, plus Memphis International, in an effort to pinpoint reasons for mounting delays. Memphis was added due to its importance as an air cargo center.

FAA administrator Jane Garvey presented the landmark study at an April 25 House aviation subcommittee hearing. "These capacity benchmarks provide important data that help us to better understand the current and future state of the nation's busiest airports," she said. "They will help greatly in the collaboration among FAA, airlines and airports as we continue the development of both near- and long-term improvements."

The study provides a maximum number of takeoffs and landings per hour for each of the airports under good and bad weather conditions.

Garvey repeatedly has assured the airline industry that the benchmarks will not be used to force scheduling changes to reduce delays. However, the publication of the document virtually is assured to fuel the debate over demand management techniques that can provide short-term remedies for the delay problem. Demand management tools include a variety of non-market options, such as slot lotteries, administrative slot limitations and airline scheduling committees. There also are possible market-based actions, such as peak-hour pricing on aircraft landing fees, congestion pricing for those airports that don't have off-peak capacity and slot auctions. Airports currently do not have the authority to implement a full range of peak-hour pricing or congestion pricing proposals. The Clinton Administration directed FAA last year to study how policies could be changed to allow airports to implement peak-hour pricing, if required.

FAA's report found that eight airports experience "significant passenger delays," defined as having 3 percent or more of their landings or takeoffs delayed more than 15 minutes. They are: New York's LaGuardia and JFK, Newark International, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago O'Hare and San Francisco. Further, the study predicted that in 10 years LaGuardia, JFK, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco and O'Hare--plus Los Angeles, still will have significant passenger delays. FAA said new runways at Atlanta and Boston should alleviate delays at those airports.

While most airports are able to handle demand under good weather conditions, LaGuardia is an exception and is the highest-ranked airport for delays in 2000, FAA said. For the year, LaGuardia had 156 delays per 1,000 aircraft operations; Newark was a distant second at 81 delays per 1,000 operations.

The study concluded that new air traffic control technologies and procedures will increase system capacity an average of 5 percent by 2010, a figure that won't keep pace with the growth in traffic. Within the decade, an additional 300 million passengers are expected to boost airline traffic to nearly 1 billion travelers annually. New runways, where feasible, are the solution to this capacity problem, FAA said, because they have the ability to increase capacity by 30 percent to 60 percent.

The nation's airport community has begun a high-profile drive this year for environmental streamlining to improve the pace of runway construction. Airports have called for the creation of a national capacity czar to designate a priority list of runway projects as critical to the nation's transportation system. This would allow projects to be reviewed under streamlined federal procedures and include concurrent, rather than consecutive, environmental reviews. The airports pointed out that only six new runways were added to large hub airports in the past decade.

The Air Transport Association said the study "dramatically illustrates the need for more runways and air traffic control modernization." However, ATA acting senior vice president for aviation safety and operations Jack Ryan, testifying before the House aviation subcommittee, said, "It is wrong to simply suppose that any time a scheduling peak is observed above the capacity benchmark that airlines are involved in some sort of scheduling abuse. Even by the most liberal interpretation of FAA's delay-reporting system, only 11 percent of all delays in the system last year were attributed to airline scheduling." The ATA supports an increase in the nation's aviation system capacity rather than the use of demand management tools.

While more runways are considered the answer to the capacity problem, Garvey noted that the problem is more complex than just adding infrastructure.

The airports included in the study are: Atlanta, Baltimore-Washington, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago O'Hare, Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky, Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Newark, New York JFK, New York LaGuardia, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Reagan Washington National, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle-Tacoma, Tampa and Washington Dulles.