Modest Steps Planned on Airline Delays

There is no quick fix for air travel delays, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said Monday after meeting with aviation leaders in an attempt to defuse tensions from a second summer of record snarls.

All sides pledged better cooperation as Slater announced a set of modest steps to ease congestion somewhat at seven “choke points” east of the Mississippi River. The airlines renewed their commitments to speed word of cancellations and delays to their customers. And they pledged to develop contingency plans for the winter holidays.

“We didn’t go into the meeting pointing fingers; we talked about collective responsibility,” Slater said. “We have much more work to do.”

Twenty organizations took part in the meeting, which lasted well past its scheduled two hours. Included were most major airlines, airport associations and unions representing pilots, controllers, mechanics, flight attendants and technical specialists. Slater was accompanied by Federal Aviation Administration head Jane Garvey, who has been striving to address the frustration over crowded skies.

Not invited were consumer groups that are calling for a regulatory crackdown on the airlines in the form of tougher government standards for customer service. Slater said he would meet separately with them at a later date.

All sides at the meeting agreed that the nation’s air travel system--carrying an estimated 670 million passengers this year--is stretched to capacity and at risk of daily disruption by anything from bad weather to bad blood between airline management and labor unions. “We are taxing the system,” Slater said.

Despite advance planning to avoid a repeat of 1999 delays this summer, chaos ensued from an unusual spate of thunderstorms in June and a continuing labor dispute at United Airlines--the nation’s largest--in which some pilots and mechanics refused to accept overtime. In a measure of how tough things got, there were five severe weather days in June 1999, but this June, there were 19 days of meteorological disruptions--including a record stretch of 12 consecutive days.

Under those kinds of pressures, delays can act as a relief valve, since it would be reckless to send airliners up in massive thunderstorms. “Sometimes delays are really a built-in safety mechanism, and you don’t want to lose sight of that,” Garvey told Congress last month.

The participants at Monday’s meeting seemed willing to set aside the intense recriminations that followed June’s debacle, when some industry figures bitterly accused the FAA of ineptitude.

That may be just as well, since demands on the system are only expected to increase. This year, the airlines will carry 20 million more passengers than last year. By the end of the decade, 1 billion passengers a year are expected to be flying.

Long-term answers to the congestion problem include the expansion of existing airports and construction of new ones, as well as a technological revolution in air traffic control that would allow pilots to chart their own routes instead of following “highways in the sky” as they do now.

But those changes could easily take a decade or more, since airport expansion often raises a host of local environmental objections and air traffic control modernization still poses major unsolved technological challenges.

American Airlines Chairman Donald Carty said the industry will not take a step that several critics are urging: curbing the number of flights at peak hours that are virtually certain to be delayed.

“If American Airlines were to unilaterally change its schedule, all they would be doing is turning over a big business opportunity,” Carty said. “We wouldn’t have dealt with capacity at all. All we are doing is trying to respond to what the market is asking.”

The choke points where Slater pledged additional steps to ease congestion are not specific locations, but air travel routes over the Midwest and the East Coast. For example, one of the steps involves using Canadian airspace to circumvent storms in the Great Lakes and New England regions.

Another measure would entail asking airlines to fly some planes at lower altitudes so more aircraft can be accommodated in premium space.