AARON KARP / WASHINGTON DC
US airfields badly need extra runways to ease congestion, but political and legal wrangling is hampering planning and construction
Despite the downturn in air travel and the flagging finances of its major carriers, the USA expects air traffic growth to return eventually and is preparing to meet long-term capacity demands. But such planning ahead is not easy, especially with politically volatile airport expansion projects taking years to map out and complete, and the viability of the long-standing hub-and-spoke system under question.
The US Federal Aviation Administration forecasts that more than 900 million passengers a year will fly commercially in the USA by 2014, which would be a 57% increase over 2002 traffic levels. But system capacity is nowhere near capable of handling such a high traffic level, as pre-11 September 2001 congestion at US airports demonstrated. Government officials say air traffic control technology, as sophisticated as it may be in future years, is no substitute for building extra runways.
"Changes in ATC technology, while important, only have a modest effect on system capacity," says Catherine Lang, director of the FAA's office of airport planning and programming. "The most important thing for expanding system capacity is building new runways. Developing runways at major airports will do the most for expanding capacity."
The FAA estimates that ATC technological improvements increase a major airport's capacity by an average of five operations an hour; a new runway, on the other hand, adds an average of 30-40 operations an hour.
Building new runways at major US airports, however, is often problematic. Many are physically constrained and unable to expand. Other airports, such as Chicago O'Hare and San Francisco, are in politically charged areas where talk of paving new runways raises thorny environmental issues and is often met by public outrage.
"It tends to be that coastal airports face more challenges [expanding] than interior airports," says Lang. "The airports in New York and San Francisco, for example, are clearly in challenging locations. No matter what, you're not going to add a new runway at [New York] LaGuardia. It's just not possible. There are probably a half a dozen or so locations around the country where we have real challenges."
While air traffic in the USA runs primarily though a series of interconnecting large hubs, planning airport development on a national level is difficult. Airport expansion is determined by the city, county and state governments that control US airports and whose interests may be incompatible with what is best for the USA's airspace system. But the FAA says it is monitoring various expansion projects and working with local governments in an effort to ensure that national interests are considered.
"The FAA today really wants to think more expansively," says Lang. "We're trying to take a more system-wide view, looking 20 to 30 years down the line at population centres and asking: 'Do we have the right amount of aviation infrastructure in place at various airports?'
"While the FAA still relies on local governments, more and more we're taking a look at the cumulative effect of airport expansion. Does the cumulative effect of all the plans make sense?"
But critics complain that the FAA does not have the internal infrastructure to push effectively for runway development.
One of them, Richard Marchi, Airports Council International - North America (ACI-NA) senior vice-president of technical and environmental affairs, says: "It's unavoidable that the locals are going to have a big say. But I think the FAA can do a better job guiding runway development. I'm talking about getting into the thick of local politics.
"They need someone who's fairly aggressive and can work through some of the local issues. If the FAA had an internal office of runway facilitation, it could be very useful."
Drawn-out process
Even if all goes well, building a new runway at a major US airport takes a minimum of seven to 10 years. The first step is to include the new runway in an airport master plan. This usually involves the airport authority hiring outside consultants to conduct impact studies and develop a runway layout plan, which must be submitted to the FAA for approval.
In submitting the plan, the airport authority must identify every conceivable alternative to building a new runway. Every potential noise, land use and social impact of the new runway must be included. Expensive studies on all these issues must be conducted before a plan can be submitted.
Once the FAA clears the plan, the future runway must endure a series of state and federal environmental reviews.
"For a controversial major runway, these things can easily take three to five years to go through," says Marchi. "Typically what happens [following the environmental reviews] is you get sued. You have to resolve all the litigation before you move forward."
Environmental groups, local residents whose homes or businesses may be affected by the new runway, and civic organisations philosophically opposed to the concept of airport expansion are among the groups usually bringing lawsuits to halt the paving of new runways.
If the airport authority and the local government entity that operates it can successfully manoeuvre through the legal minefield, only then is the contract bidding process started to find a company to construct the runway. Once a contractor is chosen, actual building typically takes about two years.
The only major new runway opened in the USA in 2001 or 2002 was at Northwest Airlines hub, Detroit Metro airport, which opened a sixth runway in 2001. The 3,000m (10,000ft) runway cost $225 million and was completed more than a decade after the airport initiated its construction process. The FAA estimates that the new Detroit runway increased the airport's capacity by 25%.
Building a new runway is "quite a project", says a Detroit Metro official. A road, drainage system and utilities all had to be relocated to make room for the runway. In addition, allowance had to be made for 68Ha (168 acres) of wetlands. Under Michigan state law, the airport was required to create 112Ha of new wetlands.
In some cases, politics and construction requirements have been so overwhelming that planned runway projects have had to be ditched.
San Francisco airport has spent $75 million in the past four years developing a $3.5 billion plan to build two runways. The plan called for filling in a portion of San Francisco Bay that abuts the airport, causing a political firestorm in environmentally conscious northern California. The airport went ahead, however, with project managers citing a need to meet future traffic demands.
However, the airport gave up in May. "My recommendation is that we put the [runway expansion plan] in a holding pattern," said San Francisco airport director John Martin. "I think it's a prudent course of action, given the great difficulties in the aviation industry now and the large drop in traffic we've experienced." San Francisco airport handled 30 million passengers in 2002, down from the more than 40 million passengers that used the airport in 2000.
Reflecting the odd mechanisms of airport development in the USA, Martin will still seek $2.3 million from the city government to continue environmental studies related to the expansion plan. "I'd hate to see the work on the environmental documents stopped entirely," he says. "At some point, the Bay Area economy is going to improve. The Bay Area overall doesn't have enough runway capacity."
Nowhere are the politics of runway expansion more convoluted - or the need for airfield expansion more critical - than at Chicago O'Hare airport. Serving as a hub for the USA's two largest carriers, American Airlines and United Airlines, O'Hare's operations affect the entire US aviation system. "I am well aware that flight delays across the country could be alleviated by improving the flow of aircraft through Chicago," says US Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle.
O'Hare modernisation
The city of Chicago has submitted its O'Hare modernisation plan to the FAA and hopes to gain federal approval within 18 months for its planned reconfiguration of the busy airport's airfield.
The plan, costed at more than $6 billion, was agreed to in late 2001 by city and Illinois state officials after more than 20 years of political wrangling on the issue. It calls for an eighth runway to be added and for three of O'Hare's existing seven runways to be relocated. According to Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the revamped airfield will reduce delays and increase airline efficiency at the world's second busiest airport.
Daley insists that the financial troubles of American and United and the downturn in US air travel are not reasons to stop the expansion from going forward. "When it comes to airport development, we have to think long-term," he says. "If we stopped every time an airline had a problem, we would never get anything built."
American says: "Despite the financial challenges facing the airline industry, the need remains for the O'Hare modernisation programme. As American has maintained for more than a decade, O'Hare's airfield configuration is outdated. Even as we evaluate [the need for] other airport development programmes around the country, we remain committed to the O'Hare modernisation programme because of the long-term savings and more efficient operations it will bring."
Daley goes so far as to suggest that, had the modernisation been done years ago, "United would have saved $290 million a year from delays alone".
The O'Hare modernisation programme assumes that the airport will remain a key hub facility - and that the hub-and-spoke model will remain viable in general.
"Whether O'Hare will remain a hub in perpetuity remains to be seen," says the FAA's Lang. "A lot of the viability of these facilities will depend on their ability to meet the needs of hubbing carriers and on the financial viability of the hubbing carriers. We are in a time when some of our longstanding hub carriers are suffering through financial turmoil and airports could have to rethink their role if the airlines ultimately fail."
US majors, while conceding that intensive cost cuts and restructuring of business models are needed, nevertheless defend the hub-and-spoke system, as do US airports. "The network system is what provides access to small communities," says Steve Van Beek, ACI-NA senior vice-president of policy. "The number of hubs and where they are is something for the private sector to decide. But we have not seen a model outside the hub-and-spoke system that would provide access to small communities and therefore we are very supportive of it."
But experts predict a "tweaking" of the hub-and-spoke concept, and point to American Airlines' strategy of "de-peaking" flights at its two biggest hubs as an example of likely changes in the traditional hub-and-spoke system.
Levelling schedules
American last year de-peaked its schedule - spreading flights evenly throughout the day rather than stacking flights during peak hours - at its Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) and O'Hare hubs.
American says de-peaking "sharply reduces our costs and it helps save capital dollars, which we desperately need to do".
The airline's then chief executive Don Carty said late last year that "de-peaking represents an entirely new way of thinking about how we run the airline. But [de-peaking goes] beyond thinking - everyone at DFW and at Chicago is now working differently, without the down times that characterise the traditional hub operation."
He added: "The result is a more efficient schedule, more productive people, and an operation that is more convenient for our customers. Over time, we will find we have fewer aircraft stacked at the end of taxiways, fewer aircraft waiting for gates, fewer misconnects - and all this with fewer aircraft required to operate the same schedule."
American has reported success with its de-peaking concept and other US majors are studying the strategy.
Overall, 10 new runways are scheduled to be built at the 31 busiest US airports over the next six years. However, notes ACI-NA's Marchi: "The 10 airports that are building new runways accounted for a minority of the delays [during the busy 2000 summer] among the top 31 airports. Two-thirds of the delays occurred at 10 airports that really can't build new runways."
So the USA must continue to scramble for ways to meet future demand, with runway development likely to stay a lengthy, arduous process in the best of circumstances and near impossible in the worst.
"There is a hardcore set of airports that just can't expand," says Marchi. While the FAA is exploring the use of secondary airports in some major markets to expand capacity (Providence, Rhode Island and Manchester, New Hampshire, have developed in recent years as complementary airports to crowded Boston Logan), new airport construction is unlikely soon in the economically slumping USA.
Says Marchi: "I think building new airports is a myth. People don't want to go out to airports in cornfields in the middle of nowhere. They want to go to big cities like Boston and New York, and that's not going to change."
Source: Flight International
