FAA reauthorization bill stalls in Senate again (7th time now)

by Charlie Leocha on December 14, 2009

salt-lake-airportI know it’s about 90 days since a very similar headline, but it’s happening again — the Senate is delaying passage of FAA Reauthorization Act once again (this makes seven times in a row). They promise they will get it done in March, but don’t hold your breath. Consumers seem to be last in the pecking order.

This latest Senate vote means the improvements to the air traffic control system will still stay on “hold.” With those improvements on hold, airlines will be burning millions of additional gallons of jet fuel. Passengers will be sitting on tarmacs far longer than they need to. Aircraft spacing in the New York airspace will stay at decades-old technical levels. Airlines will have another excuse for putting off installing advanced avionics. The solution to what some say is 70 percent of all airline delays will stay packed in boxes.

Few issues in Washington evoke the universal agreement that the need for an improved air traffic control system does. Few issues impact the American public as dramatically and air travelers so universally.

Passengers, who understand the ramifications, want it. Families who miss flights because of missed connections, want it. Businessmen trying to get home to wife and kids want it. Anyone stuck in a tarmac delay, screams for it.

Airline executives, trying to balance the books, want it to save on fuel and get more efficiency from aircraft. Pilots, circling in landing patterns, want it. Airports, limited to old capacity levels, want it. The military, that has to give up some of its training airspace from time to time, wants it. Air traffic controllers, who are doing more with less, want it.

Carbon-control-crazed Congressmen should want it. International airlines want it. Newspapers want it. Convention and visitors bureaus want it. The tourism industry across America wants.

Alas, it is not getting done.

Between extraneous issues and financing battles, the airline industry and the American public are getting the short end of the stick. It is a Christmas lump of coal from our Senators. Humbug back to them too.

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Tagged as: Delay, faa reauthorization act of 2009, senate

  • http://www.RandyBabbitt.net John J. Tormey III, Esq.

    Your comment above reflects a lack of understanding of the issue, purposeful or not. You act as if you drank their aero-mercantile Kool-Aid, Charlie. Yet while you were taking that good long drink, we were telling each United States Senator, individually:
    “Don’t blow our US$35 Billion Dollars on a broken FAA ‘run’ by college drop-out ‘Administrator’ Randy Babbitt”. Say NO to Senate Bill S. 1451 and its intended wasteful federal spending on the deceptive twin spectres of “NextGen” and FAA’s harmful “NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign”:
    http://removesturgell.blogspot.com/2009/11/35-united-states-senators-are-about-to.html

    …and we were right.

    Charlie, do you seriously think the aeromercs are asking you to throw YOUR money at this problem because they have YOUR Joe-Traveller best interests at heart? If so, you must be a very innocent man. FAA NextGen is a money-grab just like FAA Airspace Redesign. Until this past year the skies were purposefully over-saturated and over-scheduled to justify these two money-grabs post hoc – and I’m gathering from your comment above that either: (A) you didn’t see that hustle in the making; or else (B) you did see it, and yet you’re pretending you didn’t for the sake of your airline advertiser paymasters.

    The “technology” that would increase capacity has been around for 3,500 years. It’s called concrete, as in runway concrete. You mis-state air traffic controller position, and the position of the public, when you suggest otherwise above.

    Self-dealing aero-touts looking to cash-out their lobbyist pensions, would have you believe that the solution to FAA management incompetence is to throw US$35,000,000,000 more of YOUR dollars at the problem in the form of an ill-conceived 2009 FAA Reauthorization Bill. By their logic, because 1,000 monkeys have trouble writing “Hamlet” on Smith Corona typewriters, we should buy each monkey a Gateway 700XL instead. Those monkeys have names like ‘Babbitt’, ‘Krakowski’, and ‘Kennington-Gardner’. Perhaps these monkeys are your friends. Don’t tell David Grizzle, though, as he is clearly no fan of evolution.

    John J. Tormey III, Esq.
    Quiet Rockland

  • Robert

    John – just read your ranting blog post. It’s hard to think that anyone takes you seriously, the way you ramble on. Why don’t you focus your energy in a positive way to find solutions, instead of raging on the way you do against FAA administrators.

  • http://www.njcaan.org NJCAAN

    Robert, curious as to what you think is a solution besides proper scheduling of aircraft volume as opposed to overscheduling. NY airport overscheduling is well documented in FAA Federal Registrars when the agency implemented flight caps at the airport. It did so to maintain the existing delay level at LGA and EWR and to reduce it 15% at JFK. You may wish to do a little more research into capacity constraints at the 35 OEP airports. Without new airports or runways, volume controls are the only appropriate methodology to reduce delays.

    NJCAAN

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