US government to auction NYC flight slots

The U.S. government is set to auction off landing and take-off slots at Newark’s Liberty airport in September, as the beginning of a new test designed to ease travel delays throughout the country by changing travel patterns in New York’s airspace.

Officials from a major airline industry group have asserted that they will take legal action to prevent the auction.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) made the announcement of the planned auction one day after the managers of New York’s three major airports, Newark Liberty, LaGuardia and JFK, vowed to take action to block the government’s planned auction – either in Congress or in the courts.

The Bush administration is supporting a limited auction slots at the New York area airports with the objective of reducing flight delays. Delays at these major New York airports tend to have a cascade effect, meaning that connecting flights are then backed up across the country.

“Our system today is wholly unreliable. Businesses and passengers can’t depend on airline schedules,” commented one of the Transportation Department’s top lawyers, D.J. Gribbin. “At a time when our economy is in a very sensitive state, this kind of economic drag simply cannot be tolerated.”

Mary Peters, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, supports the auctioning off of a small percentage of landing and take-off slots at the three New York airports, combined with limiting landings and take-offs during peak periods, as a way of making the air travel system in the U.S. more reliable.

According to the government, in 2007, two of every three flights that were delayed by 15 minutes or more were due to delays in New York’s overcrowded airspace.

www.dot.gov