More FAA flight flapping
-
- May
- 16
When the Federal Aviation Administration announced last month that it would impose flight caps during peak hours at Newark Liberty Airport, a debate broke out about whether the caps would ease air traffic over Rockland or exacerbate it, especially with an impending airspace redesign.
Quiet Rockland saw the caps as good for Rockland. The group opposes a redesign of Northeast corridor airspace that will send hundreds of arriving Newark flights over areas of Ramapo and Orangetown. In their view, the caps would weaken the FAA’s argument for the redesign, Tom Sullivan of Quiet Rockland maintained.
County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef didn’t link the two. He also is trying to get the airspace redesign plan squashed. But, he saw the flight caps as spreading out the planes overhead, and maybe even adding flights.
Today, Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters issued a press release on several FAA recommendations to keep air travel on track (major problem at JFK and Newark, and delays there back up the rest of the nation’s airports). Here’s an interesting statement:
“The Secretary … noted that the Department today posted the final order to temporarily cap flights at Newark Liberty Airport at an average of 83 scheduled flights per hour at the airport from June 1 until October 2009. However, she noted that while the measure will spread flight schedules more evenly throughout the day, it still will allow for an additional 30 operations per day than what was offered at the airport last summer.”
So, yeah, more flights will be fitted in. The question becomes, will this ability to shoehorn in flights mean that the Northeast redesign will be ditched as unnecessary?
Considering another part of Peters’ announcement discussed the “auctioning” of a percentage of take-off and landing slots as a component of the caps, it looks like the FAA and DOT doesn’t see the caps as a sole action to solve the airspace crunch.
From today’s press release: “In order to ensure that airport caps do not become an economic drain on the region and the rest of the country, we need a way to keep aviation competition alive in the free market capital of the world,” Secretary Peters said. “This new proposal will do much to make flying to New York attractive.”
As for the idea of auctioning off slots, it’s gotten panned from the airline industry and politicians. Sen. Charles Schumer called the idea “an untested scheme” that is “nothing short of insanity,” according to MarketWatch in this article.
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 5:25 pm by Nancy Cutler.
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With all due respect to Ms. Cutler and Mr. Vanderhoef, both of whom I consider friends, Quiet Rockland: (1) maintains that the Newark Airport flight caps are good for Rockland County; and (2) believes that when this matter is assessed in retrospect after Rockland County wins its fight against FAA, the Newark flight caps will be determined to be the veritable Gettysburg of the war that we won. USDOT Secretary Peters’s comment that Newark flight caps will allow 30 more flights per day is both nonsense, and propaganda. Peters first made the same comment to an aero-trade group in early March, in a “those grapes were sour anyway” moment – trying to placate angered aero-mercantalists who knew they had just been beaten by EWR flight-cap imposition. The truth is that Peters, FAA, and the airlines fought Newark flight caps kicking and screaming. They knew in advance that the caps would wholly eviscerate their “argument” for NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign and the congestion that FAA itself artificially-inflated two years ago, taking Newark from 80 operations-per-hour to 100 operations-per-hour, as a ploy to squeeze more money out of the airspace fortheir private-sector buddies while blaming us victims on the ground. Additionally, consumer demand will never require those extra “30 flight pers day”, and consumer demand will never require a full jumbo-jet arriving or departing Newark at 3:30 A.M. Nice try, Mary! Moreover, when I attended the field hearing held by Senator Arlen Specter in Philadelphia several weeks ago at which failed FAA Acting Administrator “Bobby” Sturgell testified, Sturgell utterly refused to tell Specter the extent to which the Newark caps have already eased northeast air-space congestion. There is a reason for that. The congestion has already been eased, and Sturgell and FAA do not want to admit it, since such would undercut their claimed “need” for Redesign. Do not believe the disinformation-specialists who purport to tell you that Newark flight caps will somehow INCREASE air traffic. That’s like the Queen telling Alice in Wonderland that ‘white is black, and black is white’. That’s like a murderer telling you that he is still “searching for the real killer”. Of COURSE air traffic at an airport should be capped relative to the physical limitations of the airports and the runways! Moreover, those 80 operations-per-hour and other limitations were always historically in place until Congress removed them at around the beginning of this decade, and I’m sure the math will tell you why it happened at that particular political moment in time. Finally, remember that FAA and USDOT are failed federal agencies run by publicists and run like P.R. firms. Peters knows nothing about transportation, and I wouldn’t trust her to give me a car ride to the 7-11. Same for Blakey. Same for Sturgell.
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland
http://ejectsturgell.blogspot.com
I agree with Mr. Tormey’s above assessment about flight caps ADDING volume as FAA PR propaganda. Anybody who believes anything that the FAA states has not been reading the news lately.
Robert Belzer
Aside from cleaning up the “pers day”[sic] and “fortheir”[sic] typographical errata from my prior post above, the substantive clarifications I want to make to it are: (1) the Newark caps as thusfar implemented may have been more ‘de facto’ than ‘de jure’, although my understanding is that the reduction of the EWR operations-per-hour numbers has already commenced in at least an anticipatory fashion, and I’ll ask the Newark ATCs to back me up on that point; and (2) what Sturgell is failing to attest to, is the extent to which the overall “emergency” and other recent decongestant measures such as JFK caps and the opening of “military” air lanes, and the anticipatory changes at Newark as well, have already eased air congestion. In fact, the issue that Sturgell is purposefully side-stepping, is a much bigger and broader issue than Newark caps alone. What he is side-stepping is the to-some-degree already-pierced publicist balloon of artificial aero-expansion. Remember and never forget that the ONLY reason that the northeast airspace ever got congested, is because Sturgell and FAA let it get that way in the first instance. And that was on purpose of them.
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland
After further research, further to the above posts, and according to sources with personal knowledge of and responsibility for EWR airspace – the “anticipatory” changes referred to above, may be as expressed and implemented in what are known as “Ground Delay Programs”, imposed upon EWR on a per-day or even per-shift or within-shift basis, by the FAA’s command center in D.C. As of this month, May 2008, Newark Airport is not even hitting 83 operations per hour that often. Part of that result is therefore a product of FAA orders from D.C. Another part of that result is the current state of the economy. The conclusion is, though, that congestion “caused” by the NY Metro airspace has already eased considerably since last year, and FAA management will find every possible way to lie about same and never admit it. Want the truth? Simple. Ask an air traffic controller. Don’t ever ask a publicist.
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland
According the Final Order posted in the Federal Register – “The vast majority” of commenters were in favor of the flight caps.
It goes on to say….”The individual and non-airline organizational commenters express nearly universal support for the proposed limit on scheduled operations at EWR, primarily because they view it as an alternative to the delay reduction anticipated from New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia airspace redesign.”
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=DocumentDetail&o=09000064805d57c0
Add to that roster, 3 fine congressmen who posted comments in the Federal Register last week in support of flight caps:
Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY)
Representative Christopher Shays (R-CT)
Representative Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
Consider this a battle won in the fight against the FAA’s NY/NJ/PHL Airspace redesign.
It is time for the Senate to force the FAA to halt the Airspace redesign as unsafe and unnecessary.