Fear and loathing at the airport

By Chris Palmeri and Keith Epstein

Updated: 1:06 p.m. ET Sept. 14, 2007

When Marion C. Blakey took over at the Federal Aviation Administration in 2002, she was determined to fix an air travel system battered by terrorism, antiquated technology, and the ever-turbulent finances of the airline industry. Five years later, as she prepares to step down on Sept. 13, it's clear she failed. Almost everything about flying is worse than when she arrived. Greater are the risks, the passenger headaches, and the costs in lost productivity. Almost everyone has a horror story about missed connections, lost baggage, and wasted hours on the tarmac. More than 909,000 flights were late through June of this year, twice the level of 2002.

And if you think the Summer from Hell is over, fasten your seat belt. The FAA predicts 1 billion passengers a year will take to the skies by 2015, a 36 percent increase from the current level. FAA officials say this year's Labor Day crunch could become an everyday flying fiasco within eight years, costing America's economy $22 billion annually.

There was a time not long ago when the head of the FAA would be the last person you'd expect to express public doubts about potential catastrophe. Today, Blakey is unabashed about the rising risk of flying. There have been 339 incidents so far this year where planes got too close to each other or to objects on the ground, up from 297 in the same period last year. On Aug. 16 a passenger jet on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport came within just 37 feet of another airliner — the eighth such incident this year at LAX alone. "While it is the safest form of transportation," Blakey says, "deep in your heart you still know that [when you're] flying at 30,000 feet with no safety net you're counting on the system — a system that is at the breaking point."

So why is it that we can put a man on the moon but can't fly him from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C., without at least a two-hour delay? While Blakey bears some responsibility for the abysmal state of air travel, she follows a long line of FAA chiefs who failed to put much of a dent in the agency's to-do list. It's not a lack of money. Last year the FAA did not spend all of the money it was allocated. Nor is it a lack of knowhow. Existing technology could easily meet the demands created by the exploding number of fliers. Nor, for that matter, is it security concerns. Instead, it's a fundamental organizational failure: Nobody is in charge. The various players in the system, including big airlines, small aircraft owners, labor unions, politicians, airplane manufacturers, and executives with their corporate jets, are locked in permanent warfare as they fight to protect their own interests. And the FAA, a weak agency that needs congressional approval for how it raises and spends money, seems incapable of breaking the gridlock. "The FAA as currently structured is impossible to run efficiently," says Langhorne M. Bond, administrator of the agency from 1977 to 1981.

Gurinder Osan / AP file Federal Aviation Administrator Marion C. Blakey will step down from her position on Sept. 13.

When no one's in charge, no one can be held accountable. Small aircraft operators blame the big airlines for scheduling too many flights out of the major airports. The big carriers say the smaller operators aren't paying their share of what it takes to maintain the air traffic control system. The controllers complain they are understaffed and underpaid, and that their facilities need repair. The FAA says it needs new revenue sources to invest in new technologies. Congress says the FAA needs to manage the money it has better. And passengers blame everybody in sight, but aren't willing to spend a dime more on tickets.

Often when Blakey meets with interest groups — the airline pilots' lobby, say, or an aircraft manufacturer — they give her a metallic airplane pin. Not the cheap kind friendly stewardesses once handed children, but a classier-looking piece of jewelry. Rather than risk offending anyone by seeming to take sides, she wears more than one at a time. As she made the rounds in Washington last week, Blakey sported no fewer than three passenger jets and a pilotless drone on her crowded lapel. Each, fittingly enough, was flying in a different direction. "It's a holding pattern," she says, only half-joking. In a couple of weeks she is going to hand out her own pins when she becomes the new chief of the Aerospace Industries Assn., yet another of the big lobbying groups with a stake in FAA decision-making.

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To see how these groups paralyze the FAA, consider the fate of some far-reaching reform proposals that would help solve the congestion problem. One of the big reasons flying is so miserable is because airlines schedule more flights at desirable times than airports can handle — much as they sell seats to more passengers than their planes can hold. On a typical Tuesday morning in August at New York's John F. Kennedy International, the airport has enough capacity for around 44 departures between 8 and 9 a.m. But airlines schedule 57, guaranteeing delays, even under perfect conditions.

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The carriers are well aware that their commitments to travelers are often impossible to keep, but they make them anyway because they like to give passengers what they want. And everyone prefers to fly in the morning or early evening so they can get in a day of work or play on the day they fly. "We don't schedule flights at one o'clock in the morning because people don't want to travel at that time," says Peter McDonald, chief operating officer of UAL Corp.

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But the consequence of giving customers an unrealistically high number of flight options is that a weather delay at a key airport such as New York's LaGuardia, Chicago's O'Hare International, or Dallas-Fort Worth International can have a cascading effect on the entire system. "You can't physically get these airplanes out," says Barrett Byrnes, a controller at JFK, who says there was a 4 1/2 -mile long taxi line at the airport on the night of Aug. 22. "It just backs up into the next hour and gets worse and worse until you have a dysfunctional parking lot."

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