Military Will Share Skies to Help Ease Flight Delays

In an effort to ease gridlock in the skies, the Federal Aviation Administration will be given new authority to route commercial airliners through currently restricted military airspace, President Clinton will announce today.

Administration sources said that the change is part of a broader plan to avoid a recurrence of last summer’s record number of weather-related delays, which irked travelers and spurred industry demands for a wholesale restructuring of the nation’s air traffic control system. The plan is expected to go into effect in time for the busy summer travel season.

“This can reduce delays but it won’t eliminate them,” said a government official familiar with the plan. “As long as there is weather, there will always be delays. In a sense, delays are a safety protection.”

The change won’t jeopardize safety because civilian planes won’t be sent through the airspace during military maneuvers, sources said. Most of the flights affected will be on the East Coast.

FAA controllers also will be given more flexibility to route planes at varying altitudes to avoid bad weather. However, the plan will not involve allowing aircraft to fly closer together.

The plan envisions a higher degree of coordination between the FAA and the airlines. For example, government and industry officials have agreed to base their routing decisions on a common weather forecast to be provided by the National Weather Service.

In addition, airline and FAA officials will confer by teleconference each day to lay out plans and adjust them as weather changes. The conferences will enable managers to plan air traffic adjustments two to six hours in advance of predicted weather changes.

The new choreography will be directed from the high-tech FAA facility in Herndon, Va., about 30 miles outside Washington, where weather and air traffic around the country will be monitored on movie-sized screens. Last summer, in an effort to get flights moving more smoothly, the Herndon facility was given authority to override decisions by the 20 FAA control centers that manage high-altitude traffic nationwide.

“We had the worst summer last year in terms of delays,” FAA Administrator Jane Garvey said earlier this week. “This is not the silver bullet. We’re taking some immediate, short-term steps. Our long-range answer is modernizing the system.”

Plans to upgrade the FAA’s computers have been inching along for years. The General Accounting Office, a congressional watchdog agency, estimates that the government will have spent $42 billion on the effort by 2004, with the results still uncertain.