I am amazed that the prior FAA Administrator Marion Blakey has been able to put a ruse over the heads of ATA. Somehow she along with the Secretary of Transportation and other FAA executives have convinced airlines that the primary reason for airline delays is “our nation’s increasingly antiquated air traffic control system” (see ATA’s own press release). This rhetoric is hiding the hidden agenda in which DOT/FAA officials are simply looking for billions of dollars to fund their latest initiative called NexGen. It is no argument that NexGen offers some incredible opportunities such as enhancing our radar systems, but as an air traffic controller I can say firsthand that NexGen does nothing to absolve the nation’s worst delays at major airports like JFK, Newark, La Guardia, and Chicago O’Hare. The problem is actually quite simple to understand–a lack of runways.

Air traffic controllers utilize rules of separation in order to maintain a safe environment in which aircraft can traverse. Here is a simple example how separation standards combined with the number of runways equate to delays. Aircraft need to be lined up hundreds of miles away from their destinations with at least 3 miles in between each one. When you have two runways this essentially means you can have two lines of aircraft with each arrival stream utilizing at least 3 miles of separation. But this scenario does not include any room for departures. So essentially controllers need to create a “hole” between two arriving aircraft in order to launch each departure. This “hole” would require 5, 6, or more miles between arriving aircraft, and just to squeeze out a single departure. This means radar controllers would begin backing up aircraft several hundred miles away from the destination in order to permit ample room for this one departure. Now amplify it by 10, 20, or more departures and it is easy to understand just how quickly ATC delays occur. It also easily portrays the real problem in the ATC system–runways. It is evident to add arrivals and departures we need to either add runways to and/or we need to modify our separation standards on the runways. Seems pretty clear to me. How could the airlines get it so wrong?