'Business as usual' for New Year's flights

Air industry finishing up its preparations for Y2K

By Mary Jo Pitzl
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 21, 1999

No, your plane will not fall from the sky on Jan. 1.

Expect "business as usual" for air travel as the calendar flips from 1999 to 2000, local airline and airport officials said Wednesday.

"The year 2000 does not defeat the principles of flight," said John Meenan, a senior vice president with the Air Transport Association, which represents major air carriers in the United States.

At a Sky Harbor International Airport press conference, Meenan said airline passengers will "absolutely not" find themselves in tumbling planes on New Year's Day because of computer malfunctions.

Representatives of America West and Southwest airlines, as well as Sky Harbor officials, also said their Y2K preparations are nearly complete.

Consumers' trust appears high as airline officials reported no downturn in bookings as 2000 approaches.

Computer programers across the globe are scrambling to ensure that the two-digit year code "00" is read as 2000 and not as 1900 or some other illogical number that could cause a computer to quit or freeze.

"We will continue to run our regular schedules," said Evon Jones, senior vice president and chief information officer for America West Airlines.

Airlines traditionally scale down to a "holiday schedule" because travel historically is low on New Year's Eve, airlines officials said. The dawn of 2000 is no exception.

Many people opt to be home for New Year's celebrations, and travelers tend to already be at their destinations, Meenan said.

He plans to travel on Jan. 1 and said he has every confidence that the air travel network will function. A $16 million effort, dubbed the Aviation Millennium Project, has, since 1998, worked to ensure Y2K compliance within all the components of air travel, from the airlines and airports to suppliers and regulators.

The airlines have contingency plans in case some component doesn't work, as does Sky Harbor and other major airports nationwide, Meenan said.

Backup plans are in place in case snowstorms or power outages delay air travel, he said.

"We don't anticipate anything different on the millennium," Meenan said.

Dennis Murphy, Y2K coordinator for Sky Harbor, said the airport should meet an Oct. 31 deadline set by the Federal Aviation Administration to show compliance with 44 airport systems. Sky Harbor successfully passed a June 30 deadline to prove that 16 critical systems, including baggage handling, emergency response plans and runway lighting, will work on Jan. 1.

Murphy said 200 to 300 airport employees will be on duty Dec. 31 to assess various systems and make a required report to the FAA by 1 a.m. on Jan. 1.

Murphy said he found a few surprises while testing for Y2K compliance, but the biggest wrinkle had nothing to do with conversion to a new year.

"We found a couple of problems with the leap year," he said.

Computers skipped over Feb. 29, Murphy said, ignoring the fact that 2000 is a leap year. Those problems have been fixed, he added.

America West and Southwest officials said they are not among the estimated 1,700 air travel companies that hadn't responded to a government survey on Y2K readiness.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Transportation Department's inspector general told a U.S. Senate panel that 1,700 companies had failed to return the survey. That prompted threats to publish the companies' names in the Federal Register and to introduce legislation that would ground them as of Dec. 31 if the survey is not completed by mid-November.

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Mary Jo Pitzl can be reached at maryjo.pitzl@pni.com via e-mail or at 1-602-444-8963.

-- Bomer Heanfang (hats@helfry.com), October 21, 1999

Answers

Bomer,

I was going to post this article. I post propaganda, such as this, as well as articles on real events.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), October 22, 1999.