That's Not A Good Thing, As Far As Airline Travel Goes

(Editor's Note: Noting that airline delays are up 19 percent for summer 2007, outgoing FAA Administrator Marion Blakey nevertheless touted efforts geared towards handling more traffic in the air -- as opposed to making more room for the glut of airliners often seen stacked up on taxiways at our nation's busiest airports -- in her speech Thursday before the Command Center Briefing on Delays in Washington, DC. The complete text of that speech is below.)

So here we are. One of the worst summers on record for delays is headed for aviation's history books. Total delays are up 19 percent from where they were last summer.

And now Labor Day is just around the corner. One trade group [the Air Transport Association -- Ed.] predicts that 15.7 million people will take to the skies for the last gasp of summer. That's an increase of almost 3 percent from the year before.

As bad as this summer has been, over the last few months, we've made some nice headway in chipping away at some of those hellacious delays.

Let me tell you about two in particular.

The first is called adaptive compression. It's a computer program that constantly scans for airport slots when we're running traffic management programs. You know, one of the most frustrating things for the airlines is when a slot goes unused. It's capacity you can't recover.

And it's common for slots to open up whenever flights are cancelled, delayed or re-routed. The problem is, the carriers had no way of knowing which slots were freed up for someone else to use.

Well, now we have adaptive compression to do the job. It made its debut back in mid-March, and I have to say, the results have been huge.

Between April and July, this technology reduced delays by more than 863,000 minutes. In terms of costs, the airlines could save $35 million a year in fuel and other operational expenses.

Here's something else that made a difference this summer -- airspace flow programs.

As you know, they're traditionally used to manage delays in severe weather. For the first time, we expanded it in response to congestion. I tell you, this is a game-changer.

We've added 11 new locations, distributed throughout the center of the country. They'll help us move traffic through constrained areas — traffic destined to many major metropolitan areas in the eastern half of the US.

Last summer, we implemented 36 airspace flow programs on 19 days from June through August. We saw a 21 percent reduction in delays from what would have been if we hadn't used this tool.

This summer, we've added more AFPs. It's too soon to tell what the exact figures on delay reductions will amount to, but I can tell you that we expect them to be even greater than in '06.

What we're doing with AFP is giving airlines the choice of accepting an expected departure time or a longer route around the storm. This provides flexibility. This provides the passenger with a more dependable schedule.

As bad as it was, I don't want to think about how much worse the delays would've been without these improvements I just mentioned.

Yet despite the progress we're making, our air traffic system is still not even close to what it needs to be — what the flying public demands it should be. The system's too old and it's not nimble enough for today's activity. I'll underscore that this is why we need to move to a system for the next generation, NextGen. This is the modernization step we need to take.

The question always remains how to pay for it. With the FAA's taxes set to expire one month from today, the sand in the hour glass is quietly and quickly running out.

Once again, it's time for Congress to pass a reauthorization measure that does for aviation what's never been done before — ties the FAA's revenues to the cost of doing business. Let me tell you, if we don't get that, the improvements will sputter along, the delays will only get worse, and every weekend will feel like Labor Day.

Thank you.

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.airlines.org