CROWDED SKIES AIR SYSTEM “HAS COLLAPSED” IN U.S. “GOLDEN TRIANGLE”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31753, 9 August 1968, Page 10

CROWDED SKIES AIR SYSTEM “HAS COLLAPSED” IN U.S. “GOLDEN TRIANGLE”

(By

J. D. S. GRAHAM.

Washington correspondent of the "Financial Times ’. London)

(Reprinted from the “Financial Times” by arrangement) Painful though it is to admit, it is no longer possible to dine in New York after a hard day at the Washington office. A year ago you could make the journey from the heart of Washington to mid-town Manhattan almost always in two hours, and sometimes in an hour and a half. Now you will be lucky to be there in two hours and a half. Some recent flights have taken as much as four hours and on other days it has actually been impossible to fly there at all.

What has happened is quite simple: the air transport system in the most populous area of the United States has collapsed.

In what is called the “golden triangle”—that is, Chicago-Washington-Boston it is not possible to book on to a regular flight and have anything but the vaguest notion of when you will take off or when you will land. Indeed, sometimes you do not even know where you will land. Last month there was an aeroplane flying from Boston to New York, full mostly of businessmen. The pilot regretfully had to tell them that there was no way for them to get to New York that day and he could take them only as far as Hartford, Connecticut. In New York City The problem begins in New York City, with its three airports: John F. Kennedy airport, La Guardia and Newark. Traffic at these three has reached, and passed, saturation point. The volume of activity at busy American airports has always caused European traffic controllers to blench, but fl's summer all records have been broken. On July 3, for instance, the day before Independence Day, the New York airports handled 3588 take-offs and landings —only slightly less than one a minute for all three airports for the entire 24 hours. At O'Hare airport in Chicago, there were actually 217 takeoffs and landings in one 60minute period. This sort of thing is just too much for the airports to handle for any length of time; and its effects are fascinating, unless you happen to be a passenger. What happens is as follows: A busy day builds up, say, at La Guardia in New York. There are a lot of flights due to come in during the next hour and a lot ready to leave. There are not enough runways to cope with them all, and the poor officials in the control towers are quietly going mad. • The incoming flights have to be stopped and put in a stack above the airfield waiting their turn to land. Outgoing flights queue up and take off at decent intervals whenever there is a clear runway. Clogging Spreads Because all New York's airports use virtually the same airspace, a clogging at one affects operations at the others. Aeroplanes landing at La Guardia may force John F. Kennedy airport to close

one runway. So the whole New York area reaches saturation point. New York centre then telephones Cleveland centre and tells them not to send any more than 20 aeroplanes in the next hour. It so happens that Cleveland was planning to send 30, so ten of them have to wait at Cleveland. This puts Cleveland short of runway space, or ramp space, so Cleveland calls, say, Denver, and tells them not to send more than 15 aeroplanes in the next hour. It so happens that Denver was planning. . . . This may sound fanciful, but it actually happened three weeks ago that a delay at John F. Kennedy airport in New York stopped a transcontinental flight from taking off from Los Angeles. In case this account should be greeted with scepticism, it is only necessary to talk to anyone who has been travelling by air in America’s north-east over the last month to have it confirmed. There were 240 delayed arrivals for an average of one hour at J.F.K. in a single three-hour period. There were 5000 delays in a single week at O’Hare, J.F.K. and La Guardia, and this is considered “not out of line” by the Federal Aviation Administration. Eastern Airline was forced to close down its shuttle service from Washington to New York from 3 p.m. three Fridays ago. Everyone To Blame Who is to blame and what can be done? Again the explanation is quite simple: everyone is to blame and nothing can be done. To take the blame first, the Federal Aviation Administration is at fault for not having enough air traffic controllers. For about five years up to the spring of 1967 they did not increase the force at all, unbelievable though this may seem. There was an appropriation last year to hire and train 1500 more controllers, and this is being done. But the control centres and towers are hopelessly undermanned. Everyone is working a six-day week, and the basic minimum staffing is not being met. Even the F.A.A. admits this. America is paying for some gross oversight in the middle 19605. The controllers themselves are a bit to blame, though not as much as people are saying. The conventional theory is that they are going slow and thus creating chaos.

True, one or two have been found by the F.A.A. to have been causing delays and have been put on to other jobs. But the F.A.A. looked hard and did not find much. Indeed, anyone who has been to a control tower or area centre, watched these men working and still think they are going slow, must have a ghastly idea of going fast. The airlines are to blame in that they should have done something before it was too late. New airports have to be built, and should have been built. But the airlines could presumably have stressed the urgency of this. Also, there could be more rescheduling of flights. As it is, even on a normal day there comes a time when 14 aeroplanes are due to leave John F. Kennedy airport at the samp time. This creates an automatic delay of half an hour. But there is much talk of rescheduling now.

More controllers would improve the situation, but they take a year and a half to fully train and even then they will not ease the situation that much. Rescheduling by the airlines can do a certain amount also; but it is not always easy to re-schedule passengers, who will perversely insist on flying when they feel like it—and on all feeling like it at the same time.

The fundamental difficulty is land space and air space. New York is already saturated on both counts. For at least 10 years there has been a strong plea for a fourth airport in New York. Dozens of sites have been suggested and rejected. The trouble has been that specific interest is more powerful than general interest. The general interest of the public in having a new airport has been powerless against specific interests opposed to specific sites. Concrete Running Out As the Federal Aviation Administration puts it: the country is running out of concrete: there are just not enough runways. One of the F.A.A.’s main planners, Mr Oscar Bakke, has been predicting chaos for a long time now, and last summer singled out this summer as the time when it would erupt. His judgment of the saturation levels was remarkably accurate; but little attention was paid and little action taken.

The point that Mr Bakke makes is that there is no single reason for a major breakdown in the system, but that when you get to critical point of saturation—where everything may in fact be working fairly smoothly—then a single small extra straw may break the spine. The immediate prospects are awful. No-one can think of any solution, and everyone points out that August is normally a much busier month than July. The airlines are losing money— Eastern for instance is carrying 12.14 per cent fewer people than it expected. Pilots and crews have to be paid for unproductive time. Some airlines have even run out of pilot hours and have had to cancel flights. Last month the F.A.A. met with its regional directors at a crisis conference in Washington, but the only solutions that came up were of necessity long-term. Committee Proposed A statement has come from Mr Boyd, the Secretary of Transportation, which though important seems faintly ludicrous at the present time. Mr Boyd was speaking about the urgent necessity to plan against future traffic chaos, and he had an announcement to make. It was that the Government has appointed “an 11-member advisory committee.”

Well, maybe there is nothing else to be done. Mr Boyd gave some alarming statistics for air travel of the future. “By 1980, the number of jet airliners will triple; four times as many passengers will travel on domestic airlines: and the total number of aircraft flying hours will double. There are about 3200 publiclyowned airports in use today in the United States. In the next 10 years we will need another 900 airports.” This is a neat answer: Build a new airport every four days and we will not have any trouble. Actually I don’t care about the number of flying Hours in 1980. I just want to have dinner in New York. I could drive there. It is only 240 miles, and you can do that in three and a half hours, if you take an unorthodox interpretation of local regulations. Come to think of it, at three and a half hours, you might just beat the aeroplane.

GRANT FOR LIBRARY

(From Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, August 8. The Cabinet has approved a grant to enable the acceptance of a tender for a new library building at Aranui High School. The Member of Parliament for the district (Mr J. Mathison, Lab.) was advised of this today by the Minister of Education (Mr Kinsella).