http://www.newsday.com/ap/topnews/ap990.htm

FAA Targets Air Traffic Delays

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- ''Ground stop.'' Pilots seeking clearance to take off heard these two words all too often last summer as thunderstorms and computer glitches snarled air traffic nationwide.

Taxiways were clogged. Idling planes wasted fuel. Angry passengers missed flights.

To avoid a repeat of last year's delays, the Clinton administration developed a plan -- to be announced Friday -- to ease the gridlock during inclement weather. People in the industry say the plan aims to take a national, not just a regional, approach to managing air traffic and rerouting planes around storms.

control system command center in Herndon, Va., will be given more authority to make decisions that keep traffic moving -- a strategy that takes on new urgency in light of forecasts that commercial airplanes flying in U.S. airspace will carry more than 1 billion passengers a year by 2010. That's up from 650 million last year.

''Last summer, the standard ground stop during severe weather was two hours,'' said Paul McCarthy, an airline pilot who often flies between Boston and Washington. ''It was agony in the extreme. You'd push back from the gate on time, taxi to a remote part of the airport and set your parking brake. Passengers were packed in the back and they started sweating.

Often, airport control towers didn't have timely information. ''Decisions were being made in a vacuum and we can't do that if we're going to have an integrated national transportation system,'' said McCarthy, who declined to identify his employer.

There were 197,531 air traffic control delays between April and August last year, agency figures show. That was 36 percent higher than the same five-month period in 1998. Delays in July 1999 alone were up 76 percent over the year before.

''We had the worst summer last year in terms of delays. It's not a good record for us,'' FAA Administrator Jane Garvey said Wednesday. ''This is not the silver bullet. We're taking, I think, some immediate, short-term steps. Our long-range answer, clearly, is modernizing the system. That's why getting the resources to see that through is so important.''

Garvey said representatives from the airlines, labor unions, controllers and regulators have met every Tuesday since last fall to find a way to deal with weather problems that were exacerbated last year by computer problems at a few of the FAA's 20 control centers.

As a plane flies across the sky, air traffic controllers in these centers transfer responsibility for the aircraft like a baton in a traffic planners in Herndon can -- they sit at giant screens that show weather patterns and track all flights from takeoff to landing.

Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, is eager to see if the new plan will reduce delays, but he emphasized that it is no substitute for the FAA's $13 billion project to modernize the air traffic control system. And he said it will only work if the airlines are disciplined enough not to clog taxiways by letting planes leave gates out-of-turn.

''Everybody is going to have to play by the rules and not say 'Whoops, I guess I'm now blocking you, United (airplane), but I really needed to clear that gate,''' Woerth said. ''The amount of cooperation to make this plan work is going to be extraordinary. Nobody should be looking for a delay-free summer.''

The Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, expects delays will be down this summer, but said the long-term solution is a modern air traffic control system that can handle an expanding fleet of planes.

''The FAA's system is broken,'' the group said in a report in October. ''If it is not fixed, the resulting delays will virtually descend into gridlock.''

David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, said the traveling public has already waited too long for the FAA to do something about delays -- passengers' No. 1 complaint.

''The government's job is to predict, plan for and then produce an efficient transportation system,'' Stempler said. ''They have failed in all those areas. You had airplanes sitting on the ground burning fuel, waiting on tarmacs or flying at slower speeds. People missed meetings. They missed flights.''

On the Net: Federal Aviation Administration: http://www.faa.gov

Air Transport Association: http://www.air-transport.org

Air Line Pilots Association: http://www.alpa.org

http://www.ntsb.gov/pressrel/pressrel.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 9, 2000 SB-00-06

NTSB SYMPOSIUM ON TRANSPORTATION SAFETY AND THE LAW (PROPRIETARY DATA, PRIVACY, CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS)

Washington, DC - The National Transportation Safety Board will host a symposium next month designed to air the conflicts between the growing need for data to improve transportation safety and the industry's concern about the use of that data in regulatory actions, law suits and criminal prosecutions.

In announcing the symposium, NTSB Chairman Jim Hall noted that there is broad agreement among safety experts on the need for more comprehensive and sophisticated data. "In the future," Hall said, "as transportation systems increase in complexity, investigators will need more and better data available to them if they are to determine an accident's cause, recommend ways to prevent similar accidents, and ensure the safety of the traveling public. The need for information must always be balanced with our citizen's privacy concerns."

The symposium will bring together knowledgeable participants from government, industry (all transportation modes) and the legal community to examine the problems and hopefully point the way to solutions that can appropriately satisfy the concerns of all sectors. "The NTSB's aim," Chairman Hall stated, "is to help create a context in which safety data can be aggressively gathered while the legitimate rights of all concerned are protected."

The symposium will be held on April 25-26, 2000, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel, 2799 Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, Virginia 22202.

Issues to be discussed include:

* How the generation of data enhances transportation safety;

* The impact of government investigations and private litigation on transportation data development;

* The proper relationship among accident investigations, regulatory enforcement actions and/or criminal inquiries; and,

* The protection of trade and other proprietary information.

More information about the symposium, including a detailed agenda and list of participants can be found on the Safety Board's web site at http://www.ntsb.gov.

-- viewer (justp@ssing.by), March 09, 2000