Air travel changes source of government disputes

A Bush administration plan to ease flight delays across the nation by experimenting with New York’s air space has drawn strong criticism from Congress. Lawmakers have joined airline officials saying that this measure would make matters worse.

The Transportation Department was fiercely criticized at a hearing last week of the House’s Transportation Subcommittee, charged with looking into the government plan to offset flight delays by auctioning off flight slots at the three major metropolitan New York airports.

U.S. airports experienced near-record delays last year, and the government has reported that two out of three flights delays of at least 15 minutes were due to backups in New York area traffic.

To remedy this, the government has set limits on the number of flights that can take off each hour from New York’s airports, and the plan it has proposed is to auction off a number of airport slots as a method of controlling the overwhelming demand. The government argues that by auctioning slots, market forces will restrain demand and lead to greater overall operating efficiency.

Lawmakers and the airlines, however, maintain that this planned auction will only impose additional costs on financially-stretched carriers, and also make more of a mess of day-to-day operations at these three busy facilities.

Edward Faberman, the Air Carrier Association of America executive director, has said that the airline industry faces economic challenges that are even greater than those posed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He predicted that soaring jet fuel costs would add to the expenses of the overburdened industry by an additional $99 billion over the coming 12 months.

“To put it bluntly, there could not be a worse time for DOT to pursue market experiments that would impose hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs on an industry in crisis,” Faberman remarked.