Airlines Seek to Cut LAX Delays Over Runway Job
Like players in a slow poker game, airline executives warily eyed each other Tuesday and began reshuffling departures and arrivals at Los Angeles International Airport to offset delays expected next year when one of the airport’s four runways is temporarily closed.
“American Airlines moves one flight from 0715 to 0645,” Melvin E. Olson, an American vice president, told the men gathered in a northern Virginia hotel conference room.
“OK, I knew you could do that,” said Ed Faberman, deputy chief counsel of the Federal Aviation Administration, which brokered the meeting of every carrier that uses Los Angeles International.
Rebuilding of crumbling Runway 24 Left, expected to cost $12.3 million, will reduce airport capacity by 25% from mid-February to at least mid-June, the earliest projected completion date, and could cause massive flight delays.
The U.S. Department of Transportation predicted that failure to reschedule would delay nearly a third of the 2,000 daily flights in and out of the airport an average of 41 minutes.
Before the meeting, airline officials had worked for weeks on new schedules, while conferring with the FAA, which imposed a ceiling of 100 commercial departures and arrivals each hour.
The ceiling forced carriers to move flights out of such profitable, but overcrowded, slots as 7 to 7:15 a.m. and 9:30 to 9:45 p.m. Without such voluntary changes, they risked unpalatable alternatives--flight delays or FAA assignment of times.
Those threats forced an uneasy cooperation between airline executives.
“Nobody wants to make these moves, but we’d like the industry to share the pain,” said American’s Olson. “With the runway out of service, we don’t want our whole operation backed up.”
As one executive said: “If we don’t act in a cooperative spirit, we’re all going to get punished and passengers will suffer.”
The meeting began briskly but slowed as participants began to calculate how changing flights would affect national traffic patterns and benefit competitors. One executive said that airlines had run out of easy schedule changes by late afternoon.
“We’re at the polite part of the meeting now,” said Mark Coleman, a vice president for America West, before all the easy changes had been made. “Pretty soon it gets ugly, and there will be catcalls to those airlines that haven’t done anything yet.”
Although industry officials have predicted that the new slotting will not prevent delays, the FAA’s Faberman was cautiously optimistic that the meeting, which concludes today, will blunt the impact of the runway’s closing.
“If the airlines make these moves, it’s possible there will be minimal delays,” Faberman said. “If we leave the meeting where we started, it could have a negative impact on flights throughout the West Coast.”
