Sitting on the Tarmac: Reducing Delays at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark Airports
A NEXTOR-Led Discussion Among Key Aviation Players at the 2008 Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB)
NEXTOR graduate student Megan Smirti introducing the panel on New York aviation issues at TRB.While introducing the "Pangs of New York" TRB session she helped to organize, Megan Smirti joked that one of her motivations was "to save the air traveling children of New York from becoming jaded air traveling adults." Raised on Long Island in a neighborhood between LaGuardia and Kennedy airports where delays and cancellations were the rule, Smirti learned that air travel was "inconvenient and unreliable. To this day," she says, "I am surprised when a flight is not delayed."
The more serious reason for the gathering, noted Smirti, is the sharp increase in delays and unreliability in the National Aviation System, particularly at the New York airports. For Smirti, who is a Ph.D. student at the ITS aviation research arm, the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR), the rise in delays has a strong bearing on her research. She is focusing on solutions to reduce aircraft-generated greenhouse gas emissions. "Reducing airborne holding and idling is a way to achieve that," she said.
Setting the scene for the discussion to follow, Smirti described the geographical and geopolitical implications of the New York metropolitan area's airspace. John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and LaGuardia International Airport (LGA) are located on either end of the borough of Queens, with JFK serving as a gateway for both domestic and international travel, while LaGuardia is a major domestic airport. Newark is a hub for air and freight carriers, including Continental, and has extensive domestic and international traffic.
The Northeast corridor's effect on the national airspace
Because they are hubs and also located in the heavily traveled Northeast corridor, the New York airports have a high number of operations (take-offs and landings). And, she noted, there are two seasons with extreme weather: summer with its thunderstorms, and winter with snow and ice.
"While these have been features for years, the summer of 2007 saw the worst congestion ever," Smirti noted, with a 29 percent increase in delays, despite a three percent reduction in operations.
And because of their strategic role in the overall national airspace, delays last summer at New York airports rippled across the country. The situation drew national attention with comments by President George Bush and the appointment of a special aviation rulemaking committee ( the New York Aviation Rulemaking Committee, ARC) by Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. ARC was charged with focusing on items that could be implemented in time to reduce delays for the summer of 2008, while also developing longer-term solutions that could be agreed upon by the entire aviation industry.
"Reducing delays at these airports has become a high priority issue," Smirti noted.
Aviation leaders outline their positions
To better understand what is involved, TRB's Airfield and Airspace Capacity and Delay Committee, which is chaired by Mark Hansen, professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley arm of NEXTOR sponsored this gathering. It drew the major players in this arena. Panelists included senior staff from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the three airports; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the federal agency that regulates the aviation industry; the Air Transport Association of North America, the airlines' leading trade group; NEXTOR; aviation consultants from the MITRE Corporation and GRA, Inc.; and the federal government's Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.
Below are some excerpts and summaries of each speaker's comments, which they were invited to make, on the subject of air travel delays.To encourage a panel-like meeting, speakers were asked to prepare a short comment on the delay situation, and then prepare to respond to a series of questions. Listen to the entire session on the TRB e-session site here.
"No question" that 2007 was a bad year
Ken Wright, of the MITRE corporation, opened the discussion by confirming that there was "no question" that 2007 had been a bad year nationwide. "Nearly seven percent of commercial flights were more than one hour late," he said, citing data collected from 45 airports, higher than any year dating back to 2000. In New York, delays tripled from 2004 to 2007 at the three airports, with LaGuardia and Kennedy having the largest share. Part of the problem is due to reduced "throughput" at Newark and LaGuardia due to stricter separation standards for take-offs and landings. At Kennedy, some of the blame lies in the fact that the number of scheduled operations has risen 44 percent since 2005, he noted.
"Another noteworthy trend is a four- to five-fold increase in airborne holding, which is aircraft circling while they wait for a turn to land," he added. In October, for example, airplanes circled for nearly 80,000 minutes above the three airports, the equivalent of 55 days. At $60 per minute in operating costs, that comes to nearly $5 million for that month alone.
Small reductions could mean big gains
Michael Ball, professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland arm of NEXTOR and NEXTOR's co-director, declared that the solution to delays lay in improving access to airports and enacting broader, longer-term solutions across the system, versus "crisis mode." He pointed out numerous redundancies that lead to inefficiencies: one example, three airlines provide hourly service between LaGuardia and Washington National airport, and there are18 flights per day from Raleigh-Durham to LaGuardia on planes that have 70 or fewer seats.
If you reduced those flights just 10 percent, would passenger service really be diminished? he asked. Instead of three flights per hour, there would be three flights for some hours and two for others, between Washington and LaGuardia. Service to Raleigh-Durham would go from 18 flights to 15 flights. While service wouldn't be diminished much, "the impact on delay is very substantial," he said. To accomplish this, he suggested airlines use slightly larger aircraft and cut down the number of flights slightly.
As for moderating demand, Ball pointed to European rules that impose slot controls on airports through administrative rules. Ball proposed a market-based alternative, either congestion pricing or auctioning slots. Those approaches widen access to slots and provide an incentive to build more capacity if it is needed.
More room to grow, not limits on flights
Patty Clark, a senior official with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which runs the three New York airports, issued a "strong" endorsement of airport operators' right to decide how their airports will operate and an equally strong condemnation of any efforts to put a limit on the number of flights airports are allowed to handle.
The delays of 2007 did not come as a surprise to the New York carriers and airport operators, she said. As early as the fall of 2006, the airlines at the three airports were aware that trouble was on the horizon. Her agency led a team of 14 carriers to the FAA to say that "we have a problem." In March of 2007, the group identified 17 incremental steps that they could put in place by summer 2007: technology upgrades and other enhancements that improve capacity. But the core commitment was that no one who wanted to fly out of a New York area airport would be turned away. "We always want to accommodate the demand of folks who want to come to and leave our region. That is where we fundamentally, and respectfully, disagree with the administration," which considers operational caps an option.
Increased capacity, not increased restrictions, is what the region needs, she said. "We don't like caps. We fear caps; we hate caps." She criticized the FAA for failing to increase throughput at the region's airports while setting caps on operations. "In 1973, the FAA noted that the throughput at Kennedy was 83 an hour. I was typing papers on an IBM Selectric with carbon paper and Wite-Out. Thirty-four years later, $11 billion later, it is still 83 an hour. I cannot accept that number," she said.
Jeffrey Wharff of the FAA said the administration was trying to take into account "a number of different perspectives but always with an eye to reducing disruption to the system. The administration does not have the luxury of one solution that will benefit one segment of society. We must balance all concerns."
Sharon Pinkerton of the Air Transport Association said she wished to "echo Patty [Clark]'s remarks. We see a serious diminishment in throughput at the New York airports in the last two the years. The administration needs to focus on increasing capacity."
She also cited the FAA's difficult relations with air traffic controllers. "They had a very unique provision in their contract that allowed the administration to impose a contract on the controllers. The controllers are furious about that, and as a result have spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill trying to reverse that. We need to recognize that as an issue in New York as well."
While their "number one goal" is increasing capacity, she said that the airlines "very reluctantly" have come to support a cap on slots with trading possibilities at JFK. There would have to be a mix of administrative controls and market mechanisms, with congestion pricing "absolutely rejected." Additionally, any program to cap slots must take into consideration investments that airlines are making and have made at airports in terminals and other costly infrastructure. That is why her group has endorsed the IATA [International Air Transport Association] Worldwide Scheduling Guidelines.
The landing slots dilemma
Economist Frank Berardino, with GRA, Inc., a leading aviation consulting firm, said that auctions of slots would work. But there are "clear distributional issues between the airports and the airlines" due to investments both parties have made in infrastructure. "And obviously the other person not in the room, the consumer, has an interest," he added. Sometimes that means there is more interest in "two flights to Syracuse than 18 flights to Los Angeles," alluding to political pressure to preserve routes that might not be efficient.
He noted that property rights issues involved in airline landing slots are "not very well defined at all. We started out with a temporary program, and that lasted 35 years, and they were defined on an ad hoc basis. The airlines asserted the property right; they were allowed to buy and sell slots after 1984, amortize them on their balance sheets, and they could exchange them. Somebody once said that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the airlines did a pretty good job of asserting that right.
"Then, January 1, 2007 hit. All of a sudden, there were no more slots. Legislation ended them at JFK. The government was again confronted with a property rights problem. In the short term it became clear they had to do something."
Making the leap to "3 X" capacity with NextGen
Doug Lee of the Volpe Center noted that he had been a champion of congestion pricing for some 40 years and had recently been involved in the Department of Transportation's pilot program to test congestion pricing, among other strategies, on surface highways. "That program has been surprisingly successful in attracting interest," he noted.
He attributes that to a long campaign of explaining how it might work. "When I started teaching and promoting congestion pricing, the language of economics was not permitted in surface transportation discussions, and the general attitude towards congestion was that you ought to get a discount because there are so many people that the cost must be lower when you share it."
Currently, he's involved in "blue sky" aviation research looking to integrate new technologies and systems to increase throughput without building more physical capacity, similar to the approach being developed by the FAA's Next Gen program, which is pouring large sums into technological solutions to wring more capacity out of the existing system, with a goal of tripling throughput. It is a large challenge, Lee said.
"If you’re going to get from the current level of passenger service to one and a half times that to two times that to the magic three times that," which is the NextGen goal, "what is it going to take? In the [ARC] report, it says that these improvements will get you at least six more slots at one of the airports, that’s 1.06 X, so 1.5 X is pretty big, and 3 X is huge."
"We can imagine a lot of things, but an essential requirement is to cause behavior change. That’s clearly true in highway congestion. If there is no behavior change possible, the alternative is that people can’t respond, then there is no effect."
—Phyllis Orrick