FAA eases rules to cut flight delays; skeptics worried

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FAA eases rules to cut flight delays; skeptics worried

Posted at 10:40 p.m. PDT Monday, June 4, 2001

BY AARON DAVIS, Mercury News

The Federal Aviation Administration hopes to reduce flight delays this summer by allowing pilots to steer through storms and take off even when the destination airport is cloaked in bad weather.

It's also allowing planes to fly closer together, by relaxing a safety standard that has governed air traffic controllers since World War II. The FAA says that move is unrelated to calls to combat delays. Critics disagree, saying it's designed to speed up flights and could make the skies more dangerous.

The changes to deal with bad weather, which will be put to the test when storms hit the East Coast this month, are mostly quick fixes geared toward preventing the record 50,114 delays that passengers suffered through last June.

Among the moves:

Pilots flying toward a storm may be cleared to use onboard radar to zigzag around the worst weather rather than change course by hundreds of miles to avoid it entirely.

Planes can take off for cities with bad weather if forecasts show the storms will move out of the area by the time the flight arrives.

``When a storm is going to end at 5:17 p.m., we want planes arriving at 5:18 p.m., not taking off for the airport at that time,'' said John Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Airlines will use previously restricted Canadian and military airspace to fly around storms.

Despite the moves, the FAA says a single nasty storm could bring air travel to a standstill nationwide.

On Wednesday, the agency will outline these changes, along with longer-term plans to modernize radar, to help curb delays while cities like San Francisco decide whether to build new runways and make other airport improvements.

More flexibility'

FAA Administrator Jane Garvey says the immediate changes have made her cautiously optimistic about reducing delays this summer. ``The result is more flexibility this year in planning routes around severe weather,'' Garvey said.

There's one other change the FAA isn't publicly talking about, and it worries the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates airline disasters. Air traffic controllers can now squeeze planes as close as four miles apart in mid-flight-- instead of the five or more required since World War II.

The FAA says the move has nothing to do with delays, but others dispute that. The agency said it simply relaxed a rule under which controllers could be yanked from the tower, and sometimes fired, if they let planes fly within five miles of each other. The rigid enforcement of that decades-old standard prompted controllers to play it safe, spacing planes six, seven or even 10 miles apart.

Closer together

Now controllers can let planes fly within four miles of each other, and violate any other airspace separation standard by 20 percent, something that could cut delays.

``Controllers are going to be more inclined to run planes closer together because they've decriminalized that five-mile barrier,'' Carr said. ``If you've got 200 planes in a row and you take a mile out from between each one it's going to fractionally increase efficiency.''

Don Ellis, who trains air traffic controllers at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, said the rule might play out this summer like this: ``If you've got two storms ready to collide somewhere and you could normally get two planes through, the rule would allow you to decrease the space and squeeze three of them through before the storm hits.''

Ellis acknowledges the move could help speed up the airways. ``Politically, we have to cut down on the delays somehow,'' Ellis said.

The NTSB and other critics say the move could make flying more dangerous. ``Standards that can be violated repeatedly without consequence are no longer standards,'' the NTSB wrote in a letter to the FAA's Garvey.

Pilots, air traffic controllers and some aviation researchers say the move is safe because the limits on how close planes can fly is outdated with current technology. That may be true, said Ted Lopatkiewicz, an NTSB spokesman, but the FAA hasn't produced any data to prove it. On its face, a rule bringing jets closer together ``seems remarkable since pilots and the flying public are potentially most at risk,'' the NTSB wrote.

John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is studying how much the FAA could safely shorten the distance between planes in the air.

Passenger reaction

In the meantime, passengers like Sheri Benedict say they have little choice but to have faith in the FAA. ``I'm trusting them with my life when I get on a plane and I don't know what the rules are now. I guess I trust that any changes they'd make would be safe, too,'' said Benedict of San Rafael, who flies about three times a month on business. ``If they think it will help with delays, I'm for it.''

But passenger Shirley Reinesch said she doesn't want to see any shortcuts. `Heck, no! I don't want to be flying close to anyone,'' Reinesch said Monday while waiting for a flight at San Francisco International Airport. ``Safety first and a little patience. That's what we could all use a little more of, especially in the air.''

In the end, it's clear Mother Nature still has the last word. In April, while the FAA ramped up its efforts to speed up the airways, delays dropped 15 percent below April 2000 figures. Last month, the trend continued for several weeks. ``We were about to declare victory and go home,'' said William Shumann, an FAA spokesman in Washington.

But then rainy weather blanketed the East Coast for five days at the end of May, erasing all the gains. May numbers are not official yet, Shumann said, but preliminary data shows delays were no better than May 2000's 36,570 delays.

Contact Aaron Davis at acdavis@sjmercury.com or (650) 688-7590.

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), June 05, 2001


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