DAVID FIELD WASHINGTON DC
Airport capacity is high on the agenda as US congestion continues to squeeze. Peak-hour pricing is now among the solutions.
Airports, rather than airlines or air traffic control, are now the centre of the US flying public's focus and fixation with airline delays. The question of airport capacity and expansion is high on the list of answers in the big multiple-choice test question, over "why my flight is late?" Driving this renewed focus on runway concrete, is a long-awaited US Federal Aviation Administration project to provide the first definitions of just how many flights the nation's major airports can actually handle. The FAA's benchmarks of airport capacity for the first time define physical limits in concrete terms - literally.
By spelling out in decimal detail exactly how many flights an airport should be able to accommodate in a given hour, the study is a compelling presentation of the choice between spending more on airports or flying less. Coming at a time when airport expansion has finally begun to gain a place high up on the US national agenda, the report is "a political document, in the best sense of the term," says David Plavin president of the Airport Council International (ACI)North America.
For some major airports the report is the first-ever formal statement of how many flights they can be expected to handle. It has become the source of ammunition in moves toward the most fundamental change in US airport policy since deregulation: the move toward differential or congestion pricing.
"The capacity benchmarks bring this all together because it's a lightning rod,"says Plavin. However, he acknowledges that there is a danger that Congress or other groups could simply use the newly established capacity of any given airport to set down growth limits. "That's my concern, that it would get in the way of reasoning and be used only for the easy solution, such as limiting the airport," Plavin says from his office in Washington's lobbyist corridor on K Street. At least, the study "puts pricing on the table" he notes. "You can't get away from the fundamental question: Can pricing play a role? If you can't get a reasonable price for your service, you'll never get additional capacity," he adds.
The FAA study looks at the capacity of the major 31 airports which together account for 70% of US passenger boardings. The benchmarks themselves represent the maximum number of flights a given airport can handle in an hour and are expressed two ways: one for good weather (visual flight rules) and the other for bad weather (instrument rules).
Of these major airports, the FAA says eight already experience significant passenger delays. The definition is to have over 3% of departures occur more than 15 minutes late. These trouble spots are New York's La Guardia, JFK and Newark gateways; Chicago O'Hare; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Atlanta Hartsfield; and Boston Logan. The FAA adds that in 10 years, all of these will still have significant delays, except Atlanta and Boston where planned runway investment should alleviate congestion. The FAAis betting that Los Angeles will join the delays list over the next decade.
New technologies will increase the capacity of the major airports by 3-8% over the next decade while redesigning airspace and other procedural changes should also raise capacity by another 5-10%. However, over that same timeframe, the major airports are projected to grow by rates ranging from 7% through to a massive 51%. At some airports demand already exceeds capacity.
The FAA concedes that there is no avoiding the need for more runways, but FAA Administrator Jane Garvey adds that "runway capacity is only one piece of the delay puzzle". Presenting the report, she went to lengths to keep the study from becoming a volatile projectile in the mudslinging match between legislators and airlines. "It is important to keep the capacity benchmarks in perspective," she told the House transportation committee's aviation subcommittee. "It is data to be used to better understand the relationship between airline demand and airport capacity. It is a relatively simple expression of a complex quantity: airport capacity."
Garvey's call for perspective was optimistic. The study immediately helped to fuel accusations that airlines are worsening the problem at choke airports by overscheduling - that is they plan and advertise flights for times when they know that the airport simply cannot accommodate them.
Overscheduling claims
At O'Hare, for instance, the FAA found that airlines schedule traffic at or above capacity for 3h 30min of the day, leading to delays of 2% of scheduled flights. In bad weather, though, scheduled flights exceed the airport's capacity for eight hours a day, causing significant delays to 12% of flights.
"The findings confirm what many already believe, that airlines routinely overschedule flights" and are in large part to blame for the current congestion woes, says Congressman Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat.Jim Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who is considered a stabilising influence on the House Transportation Committee, also concedes that airlines "have a propensity to schedule more flights than runways can accommodate at peak hours".
The airline industry reaction to such concerns is predictable. Jack Ryan, acting senior vice president at the USAir Transport Association (ATA) and a 40-year veteran of FAA air traffic control, comes out swinging. "It is wrong simply to suppose that anytime a scheduling peak is observed above the capacity benchmark, the airlines are involved in some sort of scheduling abuse," he says. He argues that by even the most liberal interpretation, airline scheduling practices are at the most responsible for 10-11% of delays. He claims that the study makes no attempt to probe the deep causes of delays. "The benchmarks juxtapose the airline schedules on the capacity marks. They do nothing else," he complains.
A possible solution to overscheduling is to allow airlines to meet and co-ordinate flight schedules for peak periods at key airports. Although some members of Congress - such as DeFazio - are sceptical of these proposals, bills to grant this immunity were poised to pass key House and Senate votes by June.
Experiments with airline scheduling committees in the 1980s were far from satisfactory, apparently supporting the advantage of the incumbents. DeFazio and others fear collusion if the antitrust shield is granted. But Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a leading critic of airline service and key member of the senate commerce committee, says he will back the limited antitrust exemption as long as none of the scheduling discussions are in private.
Then there is the issue of peak-hour - or "congestion" - pricing of airport charges. But opposition from consumer groups has been strong, and in some cases absolute, based on the assumption that it would lead to higher ticket prices.
Airlines too have been unenthusiastic. ATA vice president Michael Wascom acknowledges that congestion pricing is only on the table "because some members of Congress have put it there". He adds, however, that the industry would be willing to consider this kind of pricing "in its pure form, with no exemptions." That would mean no exceptions - as are likely to be imposed by Congress - to exempt service to small and rural communities, service by new entrant carriers, to and from Canada and, possibly, general aviation.
All these interests would seem to complicate the situation at LaGuardia, the first airport where some form of congestion pricing is likely to be tried as an experiment. About 30% of LaGuardia's slots are used by the four categories likely to be exempted, says the ATA.
There is no doubt, however, that the airport is congested, again contending for a place at the top of the US delays league for 2001. Good weather scheduling is at or exceeds LaGuardia's capacity for most of the day, while in bad weather, it exceeds capacity for 12 hours of the day, the FAA says. This is in part due to a law passed last year to encourage flights between under-served communities and LaGuardia and to encourage new entrant use at the airport. So congested did LaGuardia become in the wake of the new rule that the FAA instituted a lottery in February to cut back on new flights over the summer and autumn.
But the agency must come up with a long-term solution later this year, and it is likely that it will offer a trial version of congestion pricing. A draft of pricing proposals is in preparation within the agency, but for now they would apply only to LaGuardia.
That proposal faces problems, chief among them that peak-hour pricing works when there are service level peaks and valleys. Plavin says the FAA benchmark study shows that LaGuardia is at peak capacity all day long. "There are no valleys, just peaks," he says.
Whatever the case, the FAA pricing experiment at LaGuardia is likely to happen. If and when it does, say Plavin and other airport figures, it will still be time to start pouring concrete to add the airport capacity that is needed.
Source: Airline Business
