Blame spreads for flight delays

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Grassroots Information Coordination Center (GICC) : One Thread

Most experts now believe that delays, which
have risen nearly 50 percent during the past
five years, will become worse, not better.

. . .

Airlines blame the FAA because of an antiquated
air traffic control system. The FAA counters that
airlines knowingly schedule more takeoffs and
landings at major airports than the system can
handle. And both the FAA and airlines attack
Congress for not appropriating enough money to
fix the system.

. . .

The new mainframe computers that form the
heart of the air traffic system are IBM
models built in the 1990s that have already
gone out of production. The FAA could not
buy IBM's newest machines because they would
not run the 1960s-era programming language
used in the system's software.

Register Guard

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), September 06, 2000


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